With the B-Cast’s latest data dump on Shabazz (who is pretty much the public, tattooed, hate-filled face of the New Black Panther party at this moment) it’s no longer really a question of if candidates are going to be bringing his case up as it is when candidates are going to be bringing his case up as a campaign issue.  Disclaimer: I have not been informed that any candidate is planning to use Shabazz and/or the NBPP as a campaign issue, and I have not privately advised any candidate to do so.  I am merely publicly advising it.

At this point, people are probably muttering ‘Willie Horton’ – so let us revisit that campaign strategy, after everyone watches the two commercials here and here.  It’s kind of important, given that the Left routinely acts as if GHWB used the time to openly accuse Michael Dukakis of having Horton sacrifice white babies to Satan, instead of simply personalizing the heck out of what was frankly a stupid policy in the first place.  You can argue the merits of a furlough program, and you can argue how much Dukakis was building on the work of previous administrations in implementing it – but letting out life-without-parole, first degree murderers for the weekend is what made it a stupid policy, and if you brag about the policy as a whole you’re just asking for your political opponents to bring it up.

I bring all of this up because of the aforementioned muttering.  When/if Shabazz shows up in a campaign ad the screams of racism will fill the airwaves, as will the breathless comparisons to the Horton case.  Unfortunately for the Left, that’s not going to particularly help them: because the reason why the Horton ad worked was because it was true.  Dukakis did tout a furlough program that let a convicted murderer go out and rob/rape a couple.  And an ad that brings any or all of the following points:

• King Samir Shabazz is a member of the New Black Panther party, which is a racist hate group that advocates the killing of white people. They’re  9/11 Truthers, too.
• Shabazz has a recorded history of making violent, bigoted statements – including at least one statement where he openly advocated the murder of children.
• Shabazz went to a polling place on Election Day dressed in a paramilitary uniform and brandishing a hand weapon, then proceeded to intimidate passers-by.
• The Justice Department dropped all charges against Shabazz and the NBPP after getting a conviction.
• There are multiple individuals, formerly of the DoJ, who are accusing the DoJ of doing so because of a partisan political agenda.

…is likewise going to work because all of those points are true.  I would say that a commercial that brought up the above would be a net gain for the GOP candidate in roughly 85% of all Congressional Districts, and as the voters in the remaining 15% or so pretty much think that ‘Republican’ is a synonym for ‘demon’ anyway, well*.

Attorney General Eric Holder really needs to start thinking about how to get this case reopened.  It’d be a case of allowing political considerations to trump legal ones – but then again, so was his decision to deep-six the voter intimidation case in the first place, so in for a penny, in for a pound…

Moe Lane

*Put another way: the GOP could run a test pattern in those districts and still get the Democrats accusing them of racism, so what the heck.

Crossposted to Moe Lane.