Alabama Is Now Playing The Victim Card

Alabama’s highest ranking law enforcement officer is accusing President Obama of pulling the race card to unfairly target his state.

Here’s what happened: After Alabama approved the strictest state-level immigration law to date, Latinos began fleeing.

In response, the U.S. Justice Department set-up a telephone hot line for residents to report civil rights violations. So far so good. But now, the state’s attorney general, Luther Strange, is complaining. He doesn’t like the hot line, he told Fox News why,  and it was reported in The Weekly Standard:

 “The hotline, to me, smacks of politics,” Strange said. “The Justice Department is stuck in the 1960s as it relates to Alabama. They overlook 50-plus years of fantastic progress.”

The idea here is to blame the administration of exploiting

the state’s racial past and liken its treatment of Hispanic immigrants to the way blacks were treated decades ago. And by taking aggressive action, the president’s support among Hispanic voters might improve.

Let me see if I got this right. Alabama has a dark and undeniable history of racism, and because of that history the federal government can’t set up a civil rights telephone  hotline because doing that would be playing the race card? So, logically, if Alabama didn’t have that history the hotline would be okay? I don’t get it. They’re using their dark past to defend their dark present. They’re playing with semantics and positioning their state as a defenseless victim.

The head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, Tom Perez, put the hotline in perspective:

…the goal of the hotline is “to learn” of civil rights violations. “If we don’t receive information, it’s impossible for us to figure out if civil rights laws are implicated.”

But Strange seems bent on exploiting the imagined affront in a very Orwellian way: Alabama’s racist past prevents the DOJ from setting-up a civil rights hotline to guard against racism.

Obama’s intent, they say, is to increase his support among the nation’s Latino community – and given Alabama’s most recent political history, the last thing they want is for Latinos to support anything.