If you don’t know the story: A US agriculture department employee, Shirley Sherrod, was fired for allegedly making racist remarks during a speech to the NAACP. In fact, she was making a point about overcoming her prejudices to arrive at the point of realizing that the real issue she needed to deal with was poverty, not race. The subject of the story was a white couple whose farm Sherrod invested a lot of energy and time in saving more than two decades ago. The woman whose farm Sherrod saved came forward less than a day after the inauguration of the smear to say that Sherrod had spent two years saving their farm and she considered Sherrod to be a life-long friend, but by that time Sherrod had already been forced to resign, and the press were halleluja-ing her firing.
Setting aside the fact that the smear completely reversed the point of the speech, which is made clear by the unedited version: If Sherrod actually had done what she was alleged to have done, she would have suffered a greater penalty than the people who we know for a fact permitted, encouraged, and committed torture. But of course she didn’t do it, and she suffered a greater penalty anyway.
That’s the Obama administration: Look forward, not back, except when a right wing smear artist tells you to look back.
UPDATE: The administration are apologizing profusely and more or less pleading with Sherrod to return to the agriculture department. Amusingly, this story about the turn of events manages to perpetuate the myth of the ACORN scandal ginned up by the same guy who propelled this one.
UPDATE II: We were remiss in not quoting from the Washington Post takedown on the farce linked above.
That such a sensation could have been generated by a selectively and unfairly edited videotape, posted by a conservative blogger whose record shows a casual regard for the truth, reflects badly on everyone who played a part.
This includes the government officials who acted before they learned the true story; the NAACP, which invited her to speak and then turned around and denounced her; the media that blew the story into something that had little resemblance to reality.
So that’s good, considering that the editorial policy of the Post is to cover every insane brain fart from the likes of Breitbart, the above mentioned “conservative blogger whose record shows a casual regard for the truth,” and Fox.
