Eric Holder: 'Critics Don't Like Me Because I'm Black'

By Jason Mattera

It wasn’t the disastrous Fast and Furious gunrunning operation that armed the Mexican drug cartel and led to the death of a border patrol agent that has led conservatives to call for Eric Holder​’s resignation. Nope. Nor was it the fact that Holder’s office inexplicably refuses to defend the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act and his decision to sue Arizona over its sensible law to check the legality of people living in the state.

In reality, Eric Holder is under undue scrutiny because he’s a black man. And his boss, Barack Obama​, also takes the heat because, he too, is a black man.

So says the Attorney General​ anyway: “This is a way to get at the president because of the way I can be identified with him,” he told the New York Times, “both due to the nature of our relationship and, you know, the fact that we’re both African-American.”

Holder labeled these critics the “more extreme segment,” which, as the Times describes them as, consists of Republican officials, conservative bloggers, and media commentators.

The Sunday front-page story was designed to dismiss the growing calls for Eric Holder to step down as mere partisan politics and “Washington gotcha” games; “A Partisan Lightning Rod Is Undeterred,” reads the article’s headline. According to the Times, Holder has no intention of resigning before the 2012 election, but he is currently unsure if he’ll remain attorney general if Obama were to win November.

Holder’s comments drew sharp criticism from Congressman Steve King, who has gone head-to-head with the attorney general in House Judiciary Committee hearings.

“This administration has far more racial marks against it than the people they accuse,” he told HUMAN EVENTS. “They [Holder and Obama] have racial bias within them.”

King noted that it was Eric Holder’s Justice Department that “refused to bring actions against certain parties if the end result would disadvantage a minority group,” a discriminatory policy that was exposed by Christian Adams, a lawyer with the U.S. Civil Rights Commission and author of  Injustice.

Or how about the Justice Department’s actions against the town of Kinston, North Carolina?  Here we had Holder’s office block an election where voters overwhelmingly decided to abolish political party labels for candidates running in future elections. The reasoning from the Obama administration, as Rep. King recalled, was because without party labels, blacks wouldn’t get elected.

There would be no slot in the voting booth tagged “Democratic,” suggesting that black candidates and voters will always be committed followers of whatever the DNC line of the day is.

“Removing the partisan cue in municipal elections will, in all likelihood, eliminate the single factor that allows black candidates to be elected to office,” said Loretta King, who led the Justice Department’s civil rights division at the time.

And who could forget President Obama interjecting himself in the mistaken arrest of his Harvard Professor Henry Gates, mouthing off to the television cameras that the arresting officer James Crowley acted “stupidly.”

“Obama was pro Gates and against officer Crowley because he perceived it as a race issue,” argued King.

 King says that such “racial politics” works successfully by Democrats against a lot of his Republican colleagues because they are, rightfully so, “sensitive to the charges of being called racist.”

And as a result, “Democrats have played race-based politics their entire political careers.”

But if Holder and the Democrats want to find racial politics at play, perhaps they should look to none other than the halls of their own Congress, claims King.

“The Congressional Black Caucus should be called the self-segregated caucus.”

The Iowa congressman says that it is unlikely that Holder will be impeached. King doesn’t want Holder to resign until Congress can get to the bottom of his exact involvement in the deadly Fast and Furious operation.

“Someone at ATF [Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms] had to know that those guns were going to kill Mexicans,” added King. “What if the guns were approved to kill African Americans?” King asked rhetorically.

“Was race a factor [at the ATF]? I don’t know.”

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Mr. Mattera is the editor-at-large of HUMAN EVENTS and the author of the New York Times bestseller Obama Zombies: How the Liberal Machine Brainwashed My Generation (Simon & Schuster). He also hosts The Jason Mattera Show on News Talk Radio 77WABC. Previously, he was the Spokesman for Young America's Foundation and a TV correspondent for Michelle Malkin​. Follow Jason on  Twitter, Facebook, and  YouTube.