The chilling and cowardly words of Eric Holder
Examiner Editorial
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February 19, 2009
Attorney General Eric Holder thinks Americans are “a nation of cowards” on matters of race. This is the same Holder who kowtowed to Bill Clinton to help secure Clinton’s pardon of fugitive financier Marc Rich. And the same Holder who prostrated himself to Hillary Clinton’s political ambitions by helping arrange pardons for 16 Puerto Rican terrorists. Now, he has the nerve to call the rest of us cowards, even as he speaks as the man who controls the entire federal law-enforcement apparatus? Quite simply, Holder has insulted all Americans, regardless of age or ethnicity.
Not only were Holder’s comments morally bankrupt, demonstrably untrue, and compelling proof of his own outlandish hubris; they also carried distinctly chilling undertones of government coercion. It is not the province of law enforcement chiefs to be judges and chief scolds of what their countrymen discuss. The current generation of Americans have spent half a century grappling with – and transcending – deeply rooted racial problems more extensively than any other nation in the world. President Barack Obama’s administration, with Holder its attorney general, is itself proof that Americans have more than discussed racial issues, they have voted their convictions. The glaring hubris of a man who would deem himself fit to pronounce such moral judgments on his fellow citizens is astonishing.
The context of Holder’s remarks, meanwhile, was chilling. He spoke on Wednesday not in some philosophical setting like a college graduation but in his official capacity as attorney general, to the employees at the Department of Justice. He talked of using DoJ to “creat[e] … artificial opportunities to engage one another” in conversations about race. Yet Holder also seeks to define what sorts of “conversations about the racial matters that continue to divide us” are acceptable. For instance, regarding affirmative action, he castigated those who, according to his own Olympian discernment, are “on the extremes [and] who … advance nothing more than their own, narrow self interest.”
Bizarrely, Holder criticized “the alternative [which] is to allow to continue the polite, restrained mixing that now passes as meaningful interaction.” Who is he to decide what private interactions should be “allowed”?
