The Political Freakshow

New GOP SuperPAC, FightBigotry.com, Accuses President Obama of "Racism Against White Folks." WOW!

FightBigotry.com, a new Super PAC registered with the Federal Election Commission this week, makes no bones about its aim. It intends to run an attack ad that it says will hit President Barack Obama for “his disturbing, yet crystal-clear pattern of tacitly defending black racism against white folks before and since being elected president.”

FightBigotry.com’s founder and treasurer is Stephen Marks, a well-known Republican opposition researcher whose 2008 book Confessions of a Political Hitman detailed his work in what he called “the dark side of politics.” In 2000, he launched an attack ad under the misleading name “Americans Against Hate,” attempting to tie Al Gore to controversial comments by Rev. Al Sharpton. Another Marks spot in 2004 attempted to link John Kerry to convicted murderer Willie Horton. He was forced to retract a claim in the book about then-Rep. John Shadegg (R-AZ), acknowledging that “the information was not accurate.”

A two-minute version of the new spot is already available on the group’s website, though the group promises a one-minute version is forthcoming. In it, he says:

The Obama administration has injected race into the presidential campaign. Obama Attorney General Eric Holder recently said – with no argument from the president – that their white critics are motivated by race. Implying whites are too stupid to have honest disagreements with the president without being racist is in-and-of-itself racist against whites, reinforcing Mr. Obama’s disturbing pattern of tacitly defending black racism. …

Obama’s attorney general said pursuing the New Black Panthers does a great disservice to whose “who risked all, for my people.” So it’s okay for his people to commit racial crimes? In 2009, President Obama defended his friend Henry Louis Gates after a racist altercation with police, telling a white officer he wouldn’t speak to him but would speak to his mama. Mr. Obama’s response? “The Cambridge police acted stupidly.” …

Mr. President, you ran as the candidate of change. But one thing has not changed—your tacit defense of racism against white folks, despite receiving nearly half the white vote to win the presidency.

Beyond the obvious race-baiting, the ad is riddled with factual errors. Holder’s March 2011 statement was criticizing a Congressman for equating an a 2008 New Black Panther Party incident with the much more violent assaults against voting rights advocates in the 1960s – not about “pursuing the New Black Panthers.”

And what this group terms a “racist altercation with police” involved a Harvard University professor being stopped by police for trying to enter his own home. Even conservative Fox News legal analyst and former New Jersey state Judge Andrew Napolitano called it an “improper arrest.”

In 2008, Marks said that he was “retiring from politics.” Sadly, he’s back to his old tricks — using an Orwellian name to inject racism into yet another campaign through smears.