Justice Department drops voter intimidation charges against the Black Panthers. Fox News is very angry. Again.

Hey, remember these guys from Election Day? The Black Panthers who were out front of a polling place on Fairmount looking menacing? Thanks to Fox News, they briefly became the most famous Panthers since Huey Newton:

Apparently, a voter intimidation lawsuit was brought against them after the election. And now, The Philadelphia Bulletin reports, the Obama Administration has quietly dropped the suit — mostly, it seems, because defendants Samir Shabazz and Jerry Jackson never responded to it. This, of course, has lead to all sorts of outrage from the right — including (yay!) Bill O’Reilly.

Amusingly, the Bulletin quotes Hans von Spakovsky, “a former career Counsel to the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights,” saying that the Obama Administration’s action is “unprecedented.” I say “amusingly,” because Spakovsky in that role somewhat famously overrode career Justice Department officials to support a Georgia voter ID law that the officials agreed would disproportionately keep poor, elderly and minority voters — Democrats in other words — away from the polling places on Election Day. Look into Spakovsky’s record and you’ll discover that his concern for making sure all eligible voters have access to the ballot appears to be a very recent development.

Here’s the thing: The Panthers you see in the video above were acting like jackasses. If the Justice Department dropped the suit because Shabazz and Jackson simply couldn’t be bothered, that’s more than a little lazy.

But I also can’t help but suspect that the Fox News-driven reaction to the Panthers was worse than what the Panthers did.

For one thing, I’ve never heard of any actual voters who were kept from voting on Fairmount Avenue on Election Day because of their fear of the Panthers. Perhaps there were; I’ve never heard of them. Fox reporter Rick Leventhal even admitted as much during his breathless live coverage of the matter:

“There’s been no disturbances that I’m aware of, except what we’ve encountered here. But again, I want to make very clear, we don’t know that any voters were denied entrance to this polling facility. We don’t know that anyone was intimidated to the point that they decided not to vote here, but that was what some people were concerned might be happening with two Black Panthers, one of them holding a nightstick, out front.”

Right. The problem is that two Black Panthers at one polling place in Philly quickly morphed into … well, I think this screen grab of a YouTube video description I captured on Election Day shows what the story became:

Riiiiiiight.

So we have a couple of equations in play here.

• Two Panthers + Fox News = Suggestions that somehow the election was stolen by black radicals for Obama.

• Dropped charges + Fox News and a few other crazies = Suggestions Obama is giving special treatment to black radicals.

It’s late on a Friday night. I’d like to dig deeper into the court files and get a better eyeball on the details of the case against Shabazz and Jackson. But from this vantage point, the story looks a lot more mundane — conservatives blowing up a small incident into a big case to make Obama look bad — than the play it’s getting. Go figure.