Attorney General Eric Holder spoke yesterday at the Holocaust Memorial Museum, extolling the Justice Department's central role in "today's struggle to promote tolerance, peace, justice and the rule of law."  His timing could not be more ironic, because on the very same day, the attorney general failed to comply with the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights's deadline to report whether the DOJ will allow its employees to testify in the commission's investigation of the DOJ's extraordinary decision to drop its prosecution of Black Panther Party members who menaced voters at the polls on Election Day 2008. The attorney general certainly talks a good game -- not just at the Holocaust Memorial Museum, but elsewhere, as we saw in his infamous description of Americans as a "nation of cowards" on racial issues.  But if the attorney general is really so opposed to cowardice on sensitive issues of race, then why is he so scared to talk to the Civil Rights Commission?