Will Breitbart Walk Away With Just Superficial Scratches?

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The one thing that is abundantly clear about the whole Shirley Sherrod fiasco — other than the fact that it was beyond absurd for her to be fired for her speech to the NAACP — is that Andrew Breitbart is guilty of race-baiting in the third degree. He deliberately edited the video of Sherrod’s speech, with malice aforethought, to completely distort her message, and he did this entirely in order to inflame racial hatred among white folks (just months before the November elections, what a coincidence!).

But the Obama administration’s half-cocked and totally brainless response to Breitbart’s racial mischief seems to have crowded out everything else in mainstream media coverage of the story. It’s become all about the grave injustice done to Shirley Sherrod by the Obama administration, the subsequent apologies, the new job offer. Along the way, yes, it does tend to get mentioned that all this started with a deceptively edited video launched by Breitbart, with a slingshot assist from Fox News. But the mainstream media really hasn’t (yet?) got around to focusing on the indefensible ugliness of Breitbart’s deliberate plan.

At this point, it is perfectly possible that Breitbart will walk away from the multi-car accident he deliberately caused with nothing more than superficial scratches. Today is probably the key day. The story will continue to be in the news. In fact, there are probably at least two rounds of stories still to come. The first will relate to the unique new position Sherrod has been offered. This morning, we learned on CNN‘s “American Morning” that Sherrod “was offered some type of civil rights position in the department’s Office of Outreach”. That seems to be all that is known at this point. As more details emerge, there will no doubt be extensive coverage. And then we can expect another round of coverage when Sherrod accepts or rejects the job.

Will these stories go on to call out Andrew Breitbart for ugly, deliberate, racial hate-mongering for political purposes? Or will they just lightly glide over his actions once again?

Comments

  1. norris hall says:
    July 22, 2010 at 7:09 am

    The story of Shirley Miller Sherrod is morphing from “anti white racist” to “human rights advocate”

    She grew up in the racially afflicted south.

    In 1965 her father, Hosie Miller, a black man and a deacon at Thankful Baptist Church, was shot to death by a white farmer in what ostensibly was a dispute over a few cows,

    The all-white grand jury didn’t bring charges against the shooter.

    That summer, when she and several other blacks went to the county courthouse to register to vote, the county sheriff blocked the door and even pushed her husband-to-be, Lester Sherrod, down the stairs, she said.

    She went on to earn her master’s degree in community development from Antioch University in Yellow Springs, Ohio.

    Sherrod returned to rural Georgia to help minority farmers keep their land. Because of discriminatory lending practices, black farmers were losing their farms in the late 1960s and ’70s.
    Sherrod co-founded New Communities Inc., a black communal farm project in Lee County, Georgia, that was modeled on kibbutzim in Israel. Local white farmers viciously opposed the 6,000-acre operation, accusing participants of being communists and occasionally firing shots at their buildings, Sherrod said.

    When drought struck the South in the 1970s, the federal government promised to help New Communities through the Office of Economic Opportunity. But the money was routed through the state, led by segregationist Gov. Lester Maddox, and the local office of the Farmers Home Administration, whose white agent was in no hurry to write the checks, she said.

    It took three years for New Communities to get an “emergency” loan, she said. By then it was too late.

    With black-owned farms heading toward extinction, Sherrod and other activists sued the USDA. In a consent decree, the USDA agreed to compensate black farmers who were victims of discrimination between January 1, 1981, and December 31, 1999. It was the largest civil rights settlement in history, with nearly $1 billion being paid to more than 16,000 victims. Legislation passed in 2008 will allow nearly 70,000 more potential claimants to qualify.

    USDA hired Sherrod as its Georgia director of rural development in August 2009. She was the first black person in that position; of 129 USDA employees in Georgia, only 20 are black, she said.
    Despite her father’s killing and the injustices that followed, the racial hatredshe has fought all her life, and now her quick exit from the USDA, Sherrod refuses to become bitter.

    “I can’t hold a grudge. I can’t even stay mad for long,” she said. “I just try to work to make things different. If I stayed mad, if I tried to hate all the time, I wouldn’t be able to see clearly in order to do some of the things that I’ve been able to do.

    “Even with this, I’m not angry. I’m not angry. I’m out of a job today, but I’m not angry. I will survive. I have. I can’t dwell on that. I just feel there’s a need to go forward.”

    Even Conservatives has shown a great respect for this black woman who has spent her life fighting discrimination.

    And now the Secretary of Agriculture and the Administration is admitting that they should have taken the time to listen to her whole speech instead of just the doctored version posted on a conservative blog which seemed to show her saying she “held back” from helping a white farmer stay on his land.

    Even The white farmer and his wife who are at the center of this controversy praised Sherrod for helping them fight to keep their farm from foreclosure.

    Shirley Miller Sherrod can certainly hold her head up high

    She is an example of the best qualities that all of us should emulate in our racially divided country.