Thus far, the Freedom Of Information Act lawsuit that PajamasMedia.com filed against the U.S. Department of Justice has resulted in the disclosure of dozens of DOJ employee resumes and nine largely ignored columns by Hans von Spakovsky, J. Christian Adams and Richard Pollock.
“Every Single One” is their ongoing series of posts that tediously tick off the prior work experiences of DOJ lawyers followed by commentary declaring them unabashed left-wing radicals. Ostensibly, the point of the exercise is to establish a case that the administration of President Obama is engaging in the same kind of politicized hiring at DOJ that President Bush was found to have done. Their work has been an utter failure.
Von Spakovsky et al have provided no evidence of politicized hiring practices and have been content to make the lazy claim that, given “every single one” of the latest DOJ hires is liberal, improper procedures must have been used. Unfortunately, they've failed even at this. In order to make their case that every DOJ hire is liberal, they've concocted a definition of liberal so broad that even Pollack himself likely would have to be labeled as a radical leftist.
From PJM's latest piece, highlighting the resumes of the new hires at the Disability Rights Section within the Civil Rights Division of DOJ, Pollock cites this experience of attorney Anne Raish as “liberal:”
Before arriving in the Section, she won the New York State Bar Association president's Pro Bono Service Award for her work on behalf of disabled individuals. Teaming up with Disability Advocates, Inc., the Urban Justice Center, and the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, she prevailed against New York state's refusal to provide mentally disabled adult home residents with community-based supportive housing.
They also label another candidate as liberal for having spent “an extraordinary amount of time” engaging in pro bono work (i.e. providing legal services to people who cannot otherwise afford it). This is in addition to earlier posts in which they list helping children with AIDS, serving the homeless, participating in Teach for America and other charitable activities as “left-wing.”
But wait -- Pollock referenced some of his own experience earlier in the post, noting “I run a workshop each month for the mentally handicapped at a non-profit center outside of Washington, D.C.” And according to his publicly-visible LinkedIn profile, Pollock was a producer for the liberal bastion that is ABC's Good Morning America (at least according to writers at PJM). Helping the disabled and working for mainstream media? It appears that even Pollack's credentials would not withstand the harsh, discerning glare of his own “liberal” searchlight.
He's not alone. Christopher Coates is a former DOJ ally whom J. Christian Adams staunchly defended during the contrived New Black Panther Party controversy. Coates is also a former lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union. For the purposes of PJM's politicization analysis, the letters “ACLU” on someone's DOJ resume is the mother of all red flags -- an unquestionable indication that a person has blue state blood in his veins. Yet we know that Bradley Schlozman, the Bush appointee found to have politicized hiring at DOJ, referred to Coates as “a true member of the team.” So would Coates have been labeled a liberal by Adams, Pollock and von Spakovsky?
With each post, the politicization analysis by the motley trio at PJM stretches thinner and thinner. Unfortunately, their credibility was stretched past its breaking point a long time ago.