J. Christian Adams was a hack who served in the Department of Justice during the Bush administration. Regnery recently puslihed his book Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department. I know the wing-nuts will slam it so if you like it and have an Amazon.com account, please
go to the review and give it a thumbs up. Here's my Amazon.com review:
Regnery Publishing's Rovian and Reptilian Revisionism
If the stakes weren't high, this book would be a humorous example of unintentional irony and postmodern absurdism. Unfortunately, the stakes are high and this book is a tragic attempt (aided by the usual suspects--Fox News, Hannity, Limbaugh) to turn history on its head. Since George W. Bush left office with a Department of Justice full of hacks and cronies (largely by draining the ranks of Pat Robertson's fourth-tier diploma-mill law school), the Obama administration has attempted to fix the damage. Against all evidence, Adams engages in the Rovian ploy of claiming that the Obama administration, not the Bush administration, has politicized law enforcement. The charges Adams makes are too numerous to be addressed in this review but fortunately, the media watchdog Media Matters for America has done a comprehensive online analysis of Adams' book titled, "Injustice: J. Christian Adams' Last Grasp At Glory." The review is over 10,000 words and it completely debunks Adams' cynical pseudo-history. I will address some of the more absurd elements of the book that I came across when I read it.
First, I couldn't help but notice that Adam's book is a product of Regnery Publishing. It's a bit too much for Regnery Publishing to bemoan a "racial agenda" considering that it has published at least two books--The Politically Incorrect Guide to the South (and Why It Will Rise Again and The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Civil War--that have a racial agenda: a pro-Confederate and white supremacist racial agenda. Both books whitewashed the cruelty and dehumanization of the institution of slavery (e.g., the Civil War book made the manifestly absurd claim that "Southern slaves lived much like free blacks--and whites" p. 15). Regnery Publishing chose to adorn the cover of the Civil War book with a pleasing illustration of The Butcher of Fort Pillow and KKK-founder Nathan Bedford Forrest and the book devotes a chapter to whitewashing Forrest's war crimes, virulent racism (e.g., Forrest had vowed to kill any black he encountered in uniform), and misanthropy. These are ideas that deserve to be stored in formaldehyde and displayed in The Museum of Stupidity.
I couldn't help but notice how Adams completely whitewashes the Bush Justice Department. On pages 190, 191, Adams writes this howler: ". . .the Bush Civil Rights Division enforced every voting statute on the book, even those likely to harm Republicans at the ballot box." Adams has nice words for Bradley Schlozman: "
Bush appointee, Schlozman was dedicated to race-neutral law enforcement, an outlook that made him the target of a legion of left-wing critics." For some odd reason, Adams doesn't address the U.S. Attorneys firing scandal that occurred when the Bush administration fired some principled U.S. Attorneys who refused to participate in extremely questionable targeting of Democratic lawmakers right before elections and engaging in prosecutions intended to hinder Democratic voting blocs. The left-wing criticisms of Schlozman have more to do with his falsely testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee that he was dedicated to hiring employees not based on party affiliation--while private emails indicated that Schlozman wanted to purge the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ of "pinkos," and "commies." Also, there is no mention of the Bush administration appointing operatives to the DOJ such as Tim Griffin who, during the 2004 elections, was involved in a vote caging scheme that targeted minority soldiers and students.
There are larger issues surrounding this book. The hard right's appeals to neo-Confederates no longer works in an increasingly racially diverse electorate (nor is it attractive to younger voters who are overwhelmingly repulsed by the GOP's Southern Strategy). Thus, Fox News and right-wing talk radio feature Adams and other operatives such as John Fund, Hans von Spakovsky, and Matthew Vadum who run interference while GOP legislatures and politicians attempt to disenfranchise the poor, minorities, and college students.
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