Dave Weigel has a fascinating post over at The Daily Dish about the Megyn Kelly-Kirsten Powers dust-up over allegations of voter intimidation by members of the New Black Panther Party during the 2008 presidential elections, and supposed attempts by the Obama administration to lighten the case against the Panthers. (In fact, as Adam Serwer documented here, the case was downgraded from criminal to civil on January 7, 2009 — before the newly elected Barack Obama had taken office, and obviously also before Eric Holder became Attorney General.)
The latest development in Fox’s “coverage” of this non-story is that Megyn Kelly has been getting into screaming fights with Kirsten Powers, who has been pointing out that this story has no legs. Yesterday, she threatened to cut off Powers’ microphone, and today, apparently, she screamed at her for about 10 minutes — to the enormous delight of the right:
The 10 Minutes fight between Megyn Kelly and Kirsten Powers on FNC may be the greatest ten minutes of television, ever.
I mean it.
Somebody please send me this clip. Not only did Kelly reveal Powers to be a know-nothing mouthpiece for the left (something I’ve always asserted), but she further owned her for knowing next to zero about the New Black Panther case.
Well, guess what, I disagree. What I saw in that clip was a New York Post reporter (Kirsten Powers) remaining calm and focused in the face of an incredibly abusive hysterical battering from Megyn Kelly, who talked (actually screamed) over Powers when she was attempting to answer Kelly’s questions, threatened to cut off her mike, accused her of not knowing what she was talking about (an ad hominem that Powers chose not to use in return, although it would have been true), and throughout the “interview” behaved so unprofessionally that even for a Fox News talking head it was mind-blowing.
But I digress. Let me get back to Dave Weigel’s comments. First, on Megyn Kelly and her groupies:
… The last week or so of [Kelly’s] work — her one woman crusade against the New Black Panther Party — has been truly riveting television. Kelly widens her eyes in a way that bespeaks both horror and anger at the subject she’s reporting on. “Shocking new video,” she’ll say, introducing a clip of the Panthers acting like idiots and yelling about “crackers” at a Philadelphia street festival. “We have a DOJ whistleblower alleging there is a discriminatory policy at the DOJ voting rights section,” she’ll say, “and no one seems to give a darn.” It’s the “darn” that ties this together — she’s not just a journalist, she’s a concerned citizen who has to bring you this story before it’s. Too. Late.The people who grab these videos for the web use the same cliches to title them. “Megyn Kelly DESTROYS Kirsten Powers on New Black Panther Case” says one of them; “Megyn Kelly schools lib pundit over New Black Panthers Party.” But why is she doing so many stories on the Panthers? It’s because Fox News uses the Panthers the way that Phil Donohue used to use the KKK or G.G. Allin. They’re good on TV. The difference between the Panthers and other freakish groups that look good on the air, of course, is that that they threaten white people.
And on the substance of the Black Panther case, and the right’s obsession with it:
… No one disputes that two members of the Panthers lurked outside of a heavily black, Democratic polling place in Philadelphia on election day 2008, and no one thinks this was a smart or legal thing for them to do. Police were called to the scene to disperse them, and King Samir Shabazz, who was filmed holding (though not using) a nightstick, lost the right to be a poll-watcher for the next election cycle. It was the only recorded incident like this in the nation; nearly two years later, no voter has come forward and said he or she was prevented from voting by the Panthers. And in his publicity tour to attack the DOJ over the Panther case — a second-rate case against a fifth-rate hate group — J. Christian Adams has been unable to name any case in which the DOJ was presented with a crime committed by black people and chose not to prosecute it.So why obsess over the Panthers? Is it turnabout for the way that liberals elevate the craziest tea party activists, or the way they call them racist? Because it’s obviously not a search for justice or a muckraking effort to discover reverse racism in the DOJ. If this is an effort to make sure that King Samir Shabazz is prosecuted for intimidating voters, why not try to find some voters he intimidated? Why, instead, as Kelly and Glenn Beck have opted to do, show video of the Shabazz yelling about “crackers” at a street fair before the election? No one disputes that he hates white people — just watch one of the tapes from the times Fox News invited his colleagues on to discuss how they hate white people.
One of the more jarring passages in Rick Perlstein’s “Nixonland” is his recounting of a popular myth that went around Iowa in 1966, the year of the conservative backlash against the Great Society. The myth was that black gang members on motorcycles were going to head from Chicago to ransack Des Moines. Reading this in 2008, it sounded preposterous, the kind of thing that no one could believe in the country that was about to elect Barack Obama. But Kelly, under the guise of journalism, is working to create a rumor like this in 2010. Watch her broadcasts and you become convinced that the New Black Panthers are a powerful group that hate white people and operate under the protection of Eric Holder’s DOJ. That “Megyn Kelly DESTROYS Kirsten Powers” video that I mentioned begins with her introducing a clip of a town hall meeting with Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Ca.) in which he gets an angry question about whether the DOJ has a policy of not prosecuting African-Americans.
“I am extremely sure that we do not have a policy at the Department of Justice of never prosecuting a black defendent.”
The crowd rises up. “Yes you do!” shouts one voter. When Sherman says he doesn’t know much about the Panther case, the crowd erupts in boos. They’ve been driven to fear and distrust of their DOJ by round-the-clock videos of one racist idiot brandishing a nightstick for a couple hours in 2008.
PAST CONTRIBUTOR.