Former Justice Department lawyer J. Christian Adams just got done addressing a fairly miniscule crowd in the CPAC overflow room. Adams, of course, is the conservative “whistleblower” best known for his role in the New Black Panther Party case/Fox News cause célèbre.
The case has led at least one Bush era DOJ official to suggest that the Obama Administration is actually biased against white people, while many conservatives say at the very least the Obama Justice Department is an example of racial tolerance run amok.
Much has been written about this — much of it by TPM’s Ryan J. Reilly over at Muckraker. But today, Adams was able to sum up the feeling with one short, simple story about eating outside.
Obama’s Justice Department, Adams said, is afraid of the word “picnic.”
“The Housing section of the Civil Rights Division … they won’t even hold an office picnic, ok?” he told the audience, gathered for a panel called “Lawlessness, Racialism and Terror at Obama’s Department of Justice.”
“[They don’t use] the word ‘picnic,’ because it’s viewed as a racially insensitive word,” Adams said. “They don’t call it a ‘picnic,’ they call it an ‘outing,’ but that offends other people so they’re struggling with what to call it.”
Adams says that his former colleagues in the Obama DOJ were enamored of the false myth that the word ‘picnic’ gets its origins from lynchings in the American past. That rumor floated around the net for a while, before being debunked by sites like Snopes, which proved that the word is actually derived from 17th century French.
“It’s patently false,” Adams said. “But these people buy it. And they’re running your government.”
That fact has fallen on deaf ears at the DOJ, according to Adams — they’re so afraid of offending anyone they’re still trying to figure out what to call “eating outside with your colleagues.” It’s just another example, he says, of how completely backwards the Obama Justice Department is.
“The Civil Rights Division is the most politicized part of DOJ in my view,” he said. “It’s a magnet, a beacon for some of the craziest, most leftist, crackpot attorneys and staff in the entire federal government.”
