So back in March at an NAACP function, USDA official Shirley Sherrod tells of learning her lesson 24 years ago while helping a white farmer keep his farm & being tempted to not give her best effort. That gets edited & shown by Righty blogger Andrew Brietbart, she gets condemned by the NAACP & fired w/the OK from the Obama White House. Now the whole story comes out & it seems she is exonerated & did a fine job by that farmer.
So while I’ll be the first one to say Breitbart’s an asshat in this matter & should be investigated, doesn’t this make her USDA supervisors & whoever in the White House greenlit her firing look totally cowardly? http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/abraham/detail?entry_id=68350
Classic character assassination by the right. The White House was obviously wrong, but if they had wavered a day more Glenn Beck would be saying the exact opposite.
The constant attacks on the WH and NAACP have made them paranoid. Hopefully, they will recognize this for the “teachable moment” that it is.
I can’t excuse the Obama administration for this. I find their lack of balls so disheartening I’m done. I sent an email to the White House first thing this morning saying so. There’s no way they can fix this in my opinion.
Glen Beck is just glomming on to Sherrod’s side of the story so he can take a big shit on the NAACP for jumping to conclusions. It was his network that whipped this story into a froth at the behest of Andrew ‘George Soros is Evil, But I’m Not’ Breitbart.
Fox is still shitting all over Sherrod. This morning on Fox ‘n’ Friends, they had on the USDA director under Bush (can’t remember his name) going on about … “Obama surrounds himself with questionable people, outside the mainstream, like Reverend Wright and William Ayers and now Shirley Sherrod.”
It’ll be interesting to see how this one plays out. My initial impression, based not on Fox or Breitbart but on NBC’s national broadcast last night, was that she was the wronged victim of a massive overreaction by her supervisors after being pressured by the WH. She said she learned of her firing on her cell phone when they asked her to pull over to the side of the road (she was driving) and they then fired her. Maybe she should have been fired for answering her cell phone while driving (nr) but certainly not for edited comments, taken out of context and part of a reasonable progression of a story point condemming racist attitudes.
On the other hand though, there is one thing that bothers me and I’d really like to see this addressed somewhere if it hasn’t been already. This quote from the second link in the OP… “I am just not sure how I would be treated there,” she said, adding that she couldn’t get coworkers to listen to her side of the story about a speech she made in March, edited clips of which were recently shown on a conservative website. Sherrod’s coworks should be among those that know her best, yet they refuse to stand up for her? Why not? Was it because of the judgement already handed down from such a lofty perch or was this yet another example of an attitude they’d seen before? I really hope at some point this is addressed and made public.
Now, who the frick is Breitbart? I’ve never even heard of him yet the WH considers his veracity so immune to circumspection they do no verification of their own? In what manner did he alter the video?
At first glance, WH got played… and that ain’t good.
The hatred for FOX, Breitbart (who first aired the ACORN videos) & Beck notwithstanding, the fact remains that the WH & the NAACP & in the ACORN matter, the Democratic Congress all look like easily-played chumps if they start whining “We were manipulated by bad naughty Right-wingers!”
Bill Clinton would have drank all their milkshakes, banged their wives, & made them like it.
The question is “who looks worse: a liar or someone who believes him?” The answer is usually the liar because he’s the one who acted with malice. I hadn’t followed this story before today but it does sound like Obama’s people overreacted because they were afraid of this turning into a huge issue. (It goes without saying that there’s already a group of white people out there who believe they are being discriminated against, or who are terrified of the possiblity.) If so, that was pretty stupid- they let themselves be manipulated.
I’m not letting Breitbart and Fox slide on this, but the Administration (or, if you want to be charitable to Obama, AgSec Vilsack) believed the claims of a man who is already known for promulgating deceptively edited tapes to attack liberal people and organizations (Breitbart was the major cheerleader and exhibitor of the edited ACORN tapes, as well), and is guilty of panicking at the thought of a little lying worm like Glenn Beck going on the air with that edited tape and forcing the resignation of a long-time civil servant with NO investigation at all.
To start out with the facts, can someone actually cite and quote the lie? I don’t mean a link to some website or video that I have to watch. Let’s get the lie right out here in this thread so we can judge it for what it is.
Beck doesn’t “take positions”. Beck throws shit in whatever direction will bring in the most viewers. If the White House hadn’t fired Sherrod he would have been maligning her non-stop.
I was thinking that this whole thing stunk of Rahm’s Clinton-trained caving to the right. Like they were trying to get ahead of the story by making it go away, even before the facts are known. But no matter who orchestrated it, major fuck up by the Obama WH.
Now, now- it doesn’t matter what Beck actually said. Only what he might have said if the WH had taken its time. Baad, bad naughty evil Beck. We hateses him!
Main point- NAACP & WH throw one of their own under the bus, can’t actually conduct reasonable investigations or take the freakin’ heat.