For some reason, ever since Barack Obama became president of the United States, the right wing has been stumbling from one race-baiting claim to the next. But a blog post today pulls a number of those absurd strands together. J. Christian Adams - the ringleader of the right's phony New Black Panthers scandal - is linking that conspiracy to recent Pigford-Cobell settlements to black farmers and Native Americans as “controversial racialist policies of the Obama Administration.”

And he's doing it at BigGovernment.com, the Andrew Breitbart website well-known for smearing former Department of Agriculture official Shirley Sherrod as a racist.

Adam's link between the two is “leftist” Associate Attorney General Thomas Perrelli. According to Adams, Perelli is responsible for “a race-driven political payoff by the Obama Administration to a favored political constituency” in the form of “a $4.6 billion payout to American Indians and black farmers as part of a settlement of alleged race discrimination claims.”

In reality, the bill recently passed by the Senate and the House funds settlements in the Pigford and Cobell cases. Pigford deals with well-documented discrimination against black farmers by the Agriculture Department. Cobell involves massive management malfeasance with regard to Indian trust accounts .

How “controversial” were those settlements? Their funding passed the Senate by voice vote. No senator was concerned enough about the settlements to even deny passage by unanimous consent. Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley has been a longtime champion of the Pigford settlement; on passage of the bill, the Cobell plaintiffs thanked Republican Sens. Grassley, John Barrasso, and Jon Kyl for their action. But it involves President Obama and minorities, so for people like Adams and Breitbart, it must be, as Rush Limbaugh puts it, “reparations.”

Adams also paints Perelli as being “behind the dismissal of the already won DOJ case against the New Black Panthers who organized and ran an armed voter intimidation effort the day Obama was elected.” He suggests that this was due to “the New Black Panther's endorsement of candidate Obama during the primaries,” because surely every presidential candidate dreams of the cachet that comes with the endorsement of a fringe hate group.

In reality, the Justice Department successfully obtained default judgment against a member of the New Black Panther Party who was carrying a nightstick outside the Philadelphia polling center, but dropped civil charges against other defendants. No voter has ever emerged to state they were intimidated at the time.

Adams' evidence that Perelli played a “central role” in the case is that there were “emails between Perrelli and his top political lieutenants supervising the lawsuit” about the case. Adams' previous writings on this issue reveal that the most damning email he's uncovered from Perelli states simply, “Where are we on the Black Panther case?” This seems consistent with testimony from Thomas Perez, Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division, who has said that “Whenever there is a decision involving a case that has attracted attention, we -- when the decision is made, we obviously communicate that up the chain.” That seems pretty reasonable.

But as J. Christian Adams, GOP activist, knows well, you don't get booked on Fox News by making sense; you get booked by claiming that the Obama administration is racist.