By their sheer shock value, some news stories force their way into the public imagination. The August 4^th shooting and slashing of four college-bound black teens in Newark was one such story.

Other stories, like the one out of Jena, Louisiana, just kind of finesse their way into the ether.

In and of itself, the “Jena Six” story has little real pop. Six black youths jump an unsuspecting white kid and kick him senseless.

Of the “Jena Six” only the instigator of the attack, Mychal Bell, remains in prison and this because of his string of “priors,” among them an unheroic punch out of a teenage girl.

No, these kids are not exactly the Scottsboro Boys. One of the six is back playing on the school’s well-integrated football team. This I learned watching an ESPN report that insisted on calling the unprovoked head stomping “a fight.”

Yes, the original charge of attempted murder does seem excessive, but those charges had been whittled down to the reasonable before Bell and his buddies became celebrities.

The real question here, the interesting question, is not why the crime or why the punishment, but why the hysteria. Someone consciously ginned up a lot of noise over a little injustice.

As your lawyer might ask, cui bono, who benefits? Allow me, at this point, an informed speculation.

Hillary Clinton’s most likely choice for vice president is Bill Richardson, the governor of New Mexico and a presidential candidate.

Despite an unfortunate last name and resume—he was president of his frat at Tufts-- Richardson has been able to build a political career on the ethnicity of his mother, she being famously Mexican.

If Hillary does indeed choose Richardson as running mate. the media will celebrate this “historic choice” even more cloyingly than they did when Gore chose the disposable Joe Lieberman in 2000.

On the plus side for the media and the Dems, a Richardson selection has the potential to secure the non-Cuban Hispanic vote for a generation.

On the down side, however, African Americans are bound to ask why the Democrats have not rewarded a black leader with a vice-presidential nod despite 75 years of dogged party loyalty.

This question will prove more than rhetorical if tensions between blacks and Hispanics continue to mount, especially over the issue of illegal immigration.

In Southern California, as I document in my new book, What’s the Matter with California, that tension is palpable. For the last seven year, in fact, it has fueled the LA-based radio show of the inimitable African American host, Terry Anderson.

The day I met Anderson he had just come from a rally of African Americans against illegal immigration in South Central LA’s Leimert Park. In attendance, in addition to Anderson, were the Black Minuteman and the Mothers Against Illegal Immigration.

“The anger was unbelievable,” Anderson told me, and I did not doubt him. California media, however, do their best, if not to manage this anger, at least to keep its consequences out of the news.

The national media are following their example. After it was revealed that illegal immigrants executed the black youths in Newark, the story turned as cold as Hillary’s love life.

Jesse Jackson, that bellwether of Democrat politics, felt free to blow Newark off entirely. A quick Lexis search shows only a handful of major stories that tie Jackson to the Newark horrors, and they inevitably have headlines like this, “ Newark rally aims to muzzle trafficking in illegal weapons.”

By contrast, at least 500 major stories tie Jackson to Jena. Curiously, although Mychal Bell has been in jail since December 2006, the first major media stories linking Jackson to Jena occurred in the weeks after the Newark incident.

On September 7, USA Today served up the first significant national story on Jena, and, of course, it featured Jackson.

No strangers to hysteria, Jackson and USA Today also played key roles in the bogus church burning mania of Spring 1996. This “epidemic of terror,” as the Clinton White House called it, helped the Clintons scare their black base back into the Democratic fold during their desperate drive for re-election.

The Clintons and their allies routinely described the apocryphal 1996 church burners as a “well-organized white-supremacist movement.” In 2007, the presumed white supremacists were scaring anew.

“The case of six blacks outrages the world,” screamed a headline from a Star Ledger newsroom that mustered no such outrage over the fate of the black kids slain in its very own zip code a month earlier.

Hillary, of course, seized the day. “Situations like this one remind us that we all have a responsibility to confront racial injustice and intolerance,” she pontificated on her web site.

The lemmings got the message. “I believe that a vote for Senator Clinton is a vote for a return to sanity in criminal justice from the top down,” writes a typical respondent on her blog.  

This respondent has obviously overlooked the top down events of April 19, 1993. On that fateful day, Hillary’s own gal in the Attorney General’s office oversaw the one real fatal church burning of the Clinton years.

General Reno’s tank attack killed 74 people on the plains outside Waco, 39 of whom were racial minorities, 27 of those black, ages six to sixty. Not surprisingly, Jesse Jackson has been mum on this too.

At this point, those who remember that Jackson has publicly endorsed Barack Obama might be wondering why I suspect the involvement of the Hillary camp in the orchestration of the Jena story.

This question more or less resolved itself with this September 19 headline from The State in South Carolina, “Jackson criticizes Obama: Presidential candidate’s response to Jena, La. case called too weak.”

Although Jackson would reaffirm his tepid support for Obama, he had made his point: blacks should be scared, not of illegal immigrants or their own wayward progeny, but of the archetypal, white, right-wing villains of yore—you know, the sort that vote Republican and rail against our immigrant amigos.

And Obama, alas, is not man enough to stand up to them.