Team Obama's Brother Sharpton Moment

Attorney General Eric Holder's people have no shame. After months of stonewalling, misinformation and petulant disregard for the victims of the Fast and Furious gunwalking scandal, President Obama's Justice Department is hiding behind the most despicable race-card demagogues on the planet. "Post-racial" America never looked so bitter, clingy and cowardly.

At a Tuesday press conference in Washington, D.C., human shield Al Sharpton condemned the upcoming House vote on a contempt motion against Holder as "reckless" and "morally reprehensible." Yes, the infamous hate-crimes hoaxer, cop-basher and riot incitement specialist is now the self-appointed sheriff of Capitol Hill morality. A Huffington Post report hyping Sharpton's protection racket decried the contempt citation as an "assault on minority rights." In typical race-baiting style, Sharpton told the leftwing website: "I'm not saying that this is because Holder is black, and I'm not calling (Republicans) racists. I'm saying what they're doing has a racial effect."

Of course Sharpton's accusing Republicans of racism — and by extension, he's smearing every American demanding truth and justice in Obama's bloodiest scandal. That includes the family of murdered Border Patrol agent Brian Terry, whose December 2011 death came at the hands of a Mexican thug wielding a Fast and Furious weapon. What about the Mexican government officials left in the dark about the deadly operation? And the hundreds of families of Mexican victims of Fast and Furious-enabled bloodshed? Yes, yes, they are all racists and minority vote suppression advocates, too.

Sharpton forged ahead, comparing the effort to hold Holder accountable for his serial delays and deception to racial profiling. The race-hustling reverend invoked driving-while-black imagery in lambasting the Republican oversight staffers who have "stopped and frisked" Holder, the nation's first black attorney general, "without probable cause" to be "made an example of."

While he regurgitated DOJ talking points about Holder's "unprecedented" level of cooperation, Sharpton neglected to mention that the agency has delivered less than 8 percent of the 80,000 documents sought by congressional investigators.

He forgot to acknowledge that of the 70 DOJ officials involved in Fast and Furious, 48 have been blocked by DOJ from testifying. He failed to detail the withdrawn Feb. 4, 2011, letter to Congress falsely denying the existence of Fast and Furious, Holder's flip-flops over what he knew and when, and Holder's blame-shifting assertion, withdrawn last week, that falsely accused former Bush Attorney General Michael Mukasey of being briefed on a separate gunwalking operation.

Lest we forget, the White House's racial guardian and MSNBC host is the same bigoted clown who manufactured the Tawana Brawley fake hate crime and tried to frame police officers, railed against "Chinamen," "Greek homos" and "n****rs," inveighed against Jewish "diamond merchants," and stoked black mobs at white-owned Freddy's Fashion Mart in Harlem, which was burned to the ground in 1995 after protesters broke in and gunned down four employees.

Team Obama can no more dissociate itself from Sharpton's bloody legacy than Sharpton can dissociate himself from his own poisonous tongue. In return for his blind and tireless defense over the past year and a half, Holder has publicly embraced Sharpton and endorsed his toxic racial smokescreen. In April, Holder lavished praise on Sharpton "for your partnership, your friendship and your tireless efforts to speak out for the voiceless, to stand up for the powerless and to shine a light on the problems we must solve and the promises we must fulfill." Obama himself addressed Sharpton's spring convention, as did several other Cabinet secretaries. White House visitor logs show more than a dozen entries for "Al Sharpton" or "Alfred Sharpton" over the past three years.

President Clinton had his Sister Souljah moment: a public attempt in 1992 to distance Democrats from radical racial demagoguery. The current White House has turned that centrist maneuver on its head, and American voters of good will shouldn't forget it. Obama's Brother Sharpton moment, a calculated deflection from the Fast and Furious scandal, is an unrepentant bear hug of racial extremism. Shame, shame, shame.

Michelle Malkin is the author of "Culture of Corruption: Obama and his Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies" (Regnery 2010). Her e-mail address is malkinblog@gmail.com.

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