Forget Racial Profiling, Now It's Political Profiling!

Who was not outraged by the shocking practice of law enforcement officials racially profiling minorities.  Why, they were picking up blacks all over the place, way disproportionate to their actual representation in the community.

(Of course, blacks have tended to commit crimes at up to ten times the rate of other races, but that doesn’t count.)

But now a new front has been opened in the fight against profiling.  In a breathless article in E Pluribus Media Donald C. Shields and John F. Cragan announce that the Bush Justsice Department has targeted Democratic elected officials for investigation far more than Republicans. 

Our ongoing study of the Bush Justice Department (to be published in 2009) investigates the implications of the Bush/Ashcroft/Gonzales Justice Department’s blended religious -fundamentalist and neo-conservative rhetorical vision.

It was un-biased economist Paul Krugman who first publicized this scholarship.  And instapundit picked it up.

We will leave it to others to remind the two scholars that “religious-fundamentalist” and “neo-conservative” are not strictly scholarly terms but political perjoratives which change their meanings according to the present needs of Democratic politicians and activists.

And of course the findings of the study don’t really justify the scare headlines.

If you actually look at the numbers they cite you see that at the national level the “profiling” is not that great.  In their Appendix B Shields and Cragan show that the Bush Justice Department is currently investigating the following state-wide and federal elected officials: 36 Democrats and 30 Republicans.

But it is at the local level in Appendix C where the disparity rears its ugly head.  Here the Justice Department is investigating 262 Democrats and 37 Republicans.

How could this be, other than the bigotry of religious fundamentalism and neo-conservatism?

Well, if you look at the names on the list it is amazing how many of them come from notorious cellpools of corruption: New Jersey (30 under investigation), Baltimore (20 in a “wide-ranging investigation”), and so on.

And it is a shocking fact that Republican elected officials are grossly underrepresented in the corrupt inner cities of America.  (Why is this?  More research is needed.)

It couldn’t be, could it, that the Bush Administration is just doing its job, trying to root out corruption where it is most likely to be found, in Democratic controlled big cities?