Perhaps the most intellectually bankrupt commentary on Coates came from Mary Jacoby, writing for Main Justice — a blog set up in the halcyon days of early 2009 to be the mouthpiece of the Obama DOJ. Flush with seed money, they became Eric Holder’s Pravda.

In the last month, Main Justice has lost 30 percent of its readership, and gets approximately 1/200th the page views of PJM.

Jacoby trotted out all of the intellectually bankrupt attacks. Obviously disappointed that she failed in her task at keeping the New Black Panthers story bottled up, Jacoby lamented:

The goal of conservatives who nurtured this story was always to get them validated by a non-ideological respected mainstream outlet. Now they’ve done it, thanks to a deluge of calls [to the Washington Post ombudsman.]

Really? That was the goal?

Maybe, in a world where ultimate truth doesn’t exist, would publication on the front page of the Washington Post matter. Maybe to people whose lives exist to advance their own agenda, or to be a handmaiden for a government, skewed motives lurk everywhere.

But the New Black Panther case has always been about a simpler, more important question: are we a nation that enforces the law equally?