NY Times Drools Over Jan. 6 Chairman Thompson Fighting for the ‘Right to Vote’

The New York Times celebrated partisan Democratic congressman Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi in Saturday’s paper under the laudatory headline “‘He Took Jan. 6 Personally.’” Thompson is chairing the prime-time committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

The online headline deck under the Saturday edition story, from Atlanta-based correspondent Richard Fausset and congressional reporter Luke Broadwater, was even more fulsome: “Bennie Thompson Has Spent His Career Protecting Voting Rights” — Representative Bennie G. Thompson, chairman of the committee investigating the attack on the Capitol, has spent his career fighting to protect the right to vote.”

Protecting “the right to vote”….except in the 2004 presidential election. However, the TimesThat bit I skipped.

It Times traveled to Thompson’s home town of Bolton, MS, and relayed his admirable early career fighting for civil rights, which apparently has something to do with January 6.

….Thompson accused former President Donald J. Trump of having “spurred a mob of domestic enemies of the Constitution to march down the Capitol and subvert American democracy.”

The House Homeland Security Committee chair, Mr. Thompson has nearly 30 years of experience on Capitol Hill. But his Jan. 6-based committee leadership is his most notable turn in national attention. It is also thematically compatible with his public life in Mississippi, where disenfranchisement was accomplished by intimidation, chicanery and violence.

That sounded like wishful and naive thinking.

That Mr. Trump deserves a harsh critique from Mr. Thompson is something that other Democrats and Mr. Thompson are well aware of will be more persuasive coming from Republicans, Mr. Thompson and others sure recognize. At the same time, the close alliance that Mr. Thompson appears to have forged with Ms. Cheney has softened his reputation as a fierce partisan reluctant to work with Republicans.

Nothing was said about Thompson smearing Justice Clarence Thomas as an “Uncle Tom.”

The reporters took pride in and made excuses for Thompson’s partisanship, which has previously involved calling Obamacare opponents racist.

Mississippi is the epicenter of this resistance. [to work with Republicans]It is usually attributed to the emotional scars that Mr. Thompson has from years of fighting for basic civil right. For white Mississippians, who immigrated to the Republican Party in 1965 after President Lyndon B. Johnson passed the Voting Rights Bill.

It is important to remember that more Republicans than Democrats voted in favor of the Voting Rights Bill, and that Democrats opposed civil rights legislation during the 1960s.

The paper’s apparent disgust with racial gerrymandering also has its convenient limits, as this passage proved:

A number of “Re-elect Bennie Thompson” signs were scattered around, but they are most likely a formality. Mr. Thompson’s district has been engineered to be safe for a Black Democrat, leaving Mississippi’s other three districts generally safe for Republicans.

Please note that all of the Times drivel about “voting rights” in 2020, Thompson himself objected to the presidential results in 2004, when George W. Bush defeated Democrat Sen. John Kerry and earned a second term. He objected to Ohio’s electoral vote slate, out of conspiratorial concerns that the Ohio count, which favored Bush by some 120,000 votes, had been rigged. The matter was serious. Kerry would have won Ohio, giving him the presidency.

Even the left-leaning PolitiFact had to grit its teeth, throw in a lot of hand-waving “context,” and admit that the Twitter claim from the House Republican caucus that “Thompson objected to the 2004 election” was “Mostly True.” Thompson was one of 31 House Democrats to object to Ohio’s electoral vote slate on January 6, 2005. But that particular “Jan. 6” won’t live in media infamy.