From Fox News earlier today…

(Link in case the embed doesn’t load)

Marc Morial is, of course, the former mayor of New Orleans. Morial is a buddy of Barack Obama’s. And Morial is very much an Eric Holder fan, for lots of reasons.

For him to be taking a lead role among “civil rights leaders” (how laughable a term is THAT for people like Ben Jealous and Al Sharpton to be included!) in repeating moonbat assertions that wanting to get to the bottom of Fast and Furious somehow makes you the Grand Cyclops is interesting, because it plays into a number of themes – three in particular – surrounding the Attorney General’s actions.

Let’s start with the least substantial of these; namely, the two-year-old rumor about Jim Letten’s reappointment as US Attorney for the Eastern District of Louisiana. Letten, of course, spent the better part of the previous decade picking off Morial’s cronies one by one and working his way to the top of that political machine. There was a fairly widespread conversation within the legal community that it was only a matter of time before Morial would find himself in hot federal water on a number of investigative lines; that conversation became a roar after Pampy Barre’, one of hizzoner’s chief fixers, got five years for skimming a million dollars off one of the contracts Morial let.

The rumor which circulated in those circles was that Letten, who at the time was beloved in the Big Easy for his role in taking down scads of greaseball politicos – nearly all of whom Democrats, was forced to agree to back off his pursuit of Morial in exchange for getting to keep the job he had been appointed to by President Obama’s predecessor. Since that time Letten’s office has almost completely wiped out the Dollar Bill Jefferson clan and he’s done a number on local crooks in Jefferson Parish, though the online chattiness of one of his employees has put the latter effort (and possibly his job) in question. That fact has only strengthened the claims the purveyors of this idea have been making.

We won’t make a judgement on whether the lay-off-Morial rumor has merit; we don’t know. If it’s legitimate, though, it would make a great deal of sense that Morial is out there carrying water for Eric Holder. Because if the rumor is true, Morial is the biggest Eric Holder fan in the world; Holder goes away and Letten might well be off the leash to come after Morial. And if Holder’s boss loses the election in November and Letten ends up outlasting the Obama administration, well…

Maybe you don’t like that one. Fine. Here’s another one.

Remember how the Republican accusation behind Fast and Furious is that it’s all about the Left’s compulsion to violate the 2nd Amendment? Here’s how Sen. Charles Grassley and Rep. Darrell Issa describe it, courtesy of CBS News’ Sharyl Atkisson…

Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, is investigating Fast and Furious, as well as the alleged use of the case to advance gun regulations. “There’s plenty of evidence showing that this administration planned to use the tragedies of Fast and Furious as rationale to further their goals of a long gun reporting requirement. But, we’ve learned from our investigation that reporting multiple long gun sales would do nothing to stop the flow of firearms to known straw purchasers because many Federal Firearms Dealers are already voluntarily reporting suspicious transactions. It’s pretty clear that the problem isn’t lack of burdensome reporting requirements.”

On July 12, 2011, Sen. Grassley and Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., wrote Attorney General Eric Holder, whose Justice Department oversees ATF. They asked Holder whether officials in his agency discussed how “Fast and Furious could be used to justify additional regulatory authorities.” So far, they have not received a response. CBS News asked the Justice Department for comment and context on ATF emails about Fast and Furious and Demand Letter 3, but officials declined to speak with us.

“In light of the evidence, the Justice Department’s refusal to answer questions about the role Operation Fast and Furious was supposed to play in advancing new firearms regulations is simply unacceptable,” Rep. Issa told CBS News.

The administration is saying that’s crazy talk, but they’ve yet to offer anything even remotely plausible as an alternative explanation for why anybody would think it was a good plan to let 2,000 weapons walk into Mexico without any supervision or attempt at interdiction before the bad guys started using them to put holes in people.

Here’s the thing, though – if it happens that Fast and Furious was all about gun-grabbing, that’s mighty fine with Morial. After all, Morial is a gun-grabber wannabe of long-standing in his own right – so much so that he launched a frivolous lawsuit back in 1998 in an attempt to sue gun manufacturers under product liability theory. That case ultimately went nowhere, but it got him lots of headlines at the time.

And since then he’s been a frequent flogger of anti-gun rhetoric. Here he is in 2010 at a gun control rally making noises about how a gun was used to kill Martin Luther King and other such important items of wisdom…

And then there’s the Plaxico Burress media op, as goofy as that was.

This crusade isn’t limited to Morial. Gun-grabbing is a staple of black Democrat politics in this country, and has been ever since black Democrat politicians began taking over City Halls. Since the 1994 Republican Revolution, which was inspired in no small part by the Clinton administration’s “assault weapons” ban and the reaction to it, gun-grabbing has fallen from favor, but you still see consistent efforts in places like Washington, DC – and Shreveport – to assail the 2nd Amendment rights of citizens.

Given the rather flagrantly racist history of gun control, you would think that efforts like Morial’s would fall flat in the black community and the much more historically correct view of Clarence Thomas, which comes from an intellectual tradition spanning as far back as Frederick Douglass, would be more mainstream within that community. That tradition, which holds that as a community black gun ownership and 2nd Amendment protections should be even more fiercely defended than those of other communities given the presence of a racist elite seeking to deny them rights and self-protection, has been denigrated as obsolete in this day and age. But Thomas’ concurring opinion in the McDonald case, in which a black homeowner who had purchased a gun for protection against roving bands of gang-bangers in his Chicago neighborhood, was prosecuted for violation of the city’s gun restrictions, showed it is very relevant in the current urban atmosphere.

Relevant, but not supported by most of the black political power structure. Louisiana’s two largest cities with black mayors, Baton Rouge and Shreveport, are represented in a prominent gun-control group, Mayors Against Illegal Guns, along with Morial’s current successor in New Orleans. Have a look at the roster of that organization’s membership and you’ll see the vast majority of the nation’s black mayors are involved with Kip Holden, Cedric Glover and Mitch Landrieu in efforts to fight concealed-carry reciprocity, crack down on gun dealers and impose lots of other measures making it more difficult for citizens to arm themselves. Those measures are couched in law-enforcement garb, but history and experience show that gun availability in the black market is so prevalent that those initiatives won’t solve anything.

The co-chairman of Mayors Against Illegal Guns is Michael Bloomberg, which tells you all you need to know about what’s really behind their policy proposals. It’s about control.

It’s also about making excuses. Urban violence arises out of cultural concerns – breakdown of the family, social pathology and so on – but you can’t get elected by telling people that the problem is bad individual behavior on a large scale and that they’re going to have to solve it themselves. Instead, you say it’s about guns – and by doing so you can give those folks a nice scapegoat for a problem they now don’t have to solve. The gun-grabbing argument is merely a less-unhinged version of the “CIA invented AIDS in a lab to kill black people” theory and the “Reagan invented crack cocaine to hook black folks on drugs” theory; all three are ways to excuse cultural and behavioral problems in the black community which require personal discipline and moral foundations to solve.

You don’t have widespread drug, gun or unwed pregnancy problems among the black middle class in the suburbs, or at least you don’t have them in the numbers you do in the inner cities. That’s because the black middle class in the suburbs has rejected the culture of the inner city. But the black middle class in the suburbs isn’t in a position to vote for a Kip Holden or Marc Morial or Vincent Gray, so they don’t matter all that much anymore and they’re certainly not appreciated for busting the narrative about how guns are the killers and not the killers who use them.

And so the Obama administration is heroic for attempting to use Fast and Furious as a gun-grab – and Holder as the protagonist for doing so is a hero in particular. So that would be why Morial has thrown his credibility, such as it is, into the wind for defending him with the race card.

If you haven’t noticed, by the way, Morial mentioned that it has to be racial animus behind the criticism of Holder since he has a “sterling” reputation for honesty and probity. Which is Orwellian in its mind-boggling dishonesty; after all, it was Holder who arranged the toxic 11th-hour pardon of Marc Rich from an outgoing Bill Clinton and actually attempted to defend that action when it was brought up during his confirmation hearing by saying he didn’t know much about it. Sound familiar at all?

And that, in a roundabout way, brings us to the third meme behind Morial’s race-card defense of Holder. And this is the part which is most important and relevant to Morial and the political pond he swims in.

Namely, that Holder’s most important political initiative as Attorney General is to wedge open the voter rolls across the country to access for his friends at ACORN/Project Vote, Demos and the NAACP to perpetuate the urban Democrat machines Morial’s Urban League buddies thrive on.

By any means necessary.

Take, for example, the Justice Department’s flat refusal to stomach any state’s adoption of voter ID laws despite the Supreme Court having ruled them constitutional and the public at large overwhelmingly supporting them.

Holder’s DOJ has bent itself into a pretzel attempting to rationalize the unconstitutionality of voter ID laws. They’re discriminatory against blacks and Hispanics though the numbers don’t show any particular disparate statistical impact. They’re discriminatory against old people, though you can’t get a social security check or Medicare or apply for any government benefits without having a picture ID. And so on.

But ask South Carolina and Texas about Holder’s Justice Department and their actions. He’s not trying to win the argument, he’s doing everything he can to bully states into giving in to voter fraud.

And DOJ refuses to investigate voter fraud, despite the fact it’s obviously an issue. In Washington, DC, one of James O’Keefe’s guys actually walked in and got a ballot under Eric Holder’s name without showing an ID, just to prove how easy it is; that was just one of several examples O’Keefe has generated. And then there were the voter fraud cases in New York and Indiana just recently.

DOJ says accusations of voter fraud are “manufactured.” Earlier this month, of course, there was a 96 percent voter turnout in Madison, Wisconsin for that state’s recall election amid reports expecting turnout over 100 percent. They have same-day registration and voting in Wisconsin, and they also have a judge who enjoined the new voter ID law there signed by the governor he had also signed a petition to recall. They also had some bus traffic into the state that day for the express purpose of stealing the election, though it didn’t work out as planned.

Holder’s DOJ hasn’t made much of a show of looking into any of that. They’re too busy suing Louisiana and other states over their insufficient vigor in registering welfare recipients to vote, as required by the 1993 Motor Voter law. The attorney general is very interested in Title 7 of Motor Voter, which mandates that states proselytize voter registration to every seeker of government assistance who wanders through their doors, but has absolutely no interest in Title 8 of that law.

Title 8 requires that states maintain clean voter rolls and scrub them of dead people and other ineligible voters. We saw just how committed to Title 8 Holder is when Florida attempted to scrub some 100,000 names from the voter rolls who appear to be ineligible due to lack of citizenship or mortality. His response was to sue that state, in spite of evidence that there were illegal aliens and other ineligible voters pulling levers in the Sunshine State. And, thankfully, Holder was blown out of the water by a federal judge in Tallahassee today.

There is much more to the DOJ’s assault on the integrity of the voter rolls and those who would preserve that integrity, and we’ll address that question in a post later this week. But suffice it to say that old-fashioned urban Democrat machine politicians like Marc Morial, who thrive on racial politics and questionable voting practices, would fiercely defend Holder and relate all questions back to their core issues.

But Morial’s outburst is perplexing, in a sense. Because the general public is highly unlikely to support the agenda of groups like Project Vote and the NAACP when that agenda is exposed as promoting policies to make voter fraud easier. It was a political mistake when Nancy Pelosi was the first to claim the Fast and Furious/contempt of Congress issue was a cover for voter suppression; few outside of San Francisco and Washington take her seriously in the best of circumstances, but she was roundly hooted from the national podium when she floated that narrative.

For the “civil rights” leadership to not only echo Pelosi but double down on those allegations means they have to be seriously analyzed. And when the full scope of what Holder is doing on voting issues, going all the way back to his refusal to prosecute the New Black Panthers in a clear case of voter intimidation (which has now metastasized into their threatening violence against Republican conventioneers in Tampa), is laid out for the public thanks to Morial and his friends bringing it to the public eye, well…

UPDATE: On the gun-grabbing topic, there’s this from 1995 – it’s Holder talking about “brainwashing” people to hate guns and do creative, innovative things to do that. That does establish something of a pattern, no?