Posted on 07/22/2010 7:40:30 AM PDT by Kaslin
The fiasco of the forced resignation of Shirley Sherrod has become one of the major stories of the day. It began when BigGovernment.com released a video given to Andrew Breitbart, which seemed to suggest, as Breitbart wrote, “video evidence of racism coming from a federal appointee and NAACP award recipient and in another clip from the same event a perfect rationalization for why the Tea Party needs to exist.”
What irked Breitbart — correctly — was that the Tea Party was being branded as racist by the NAACP and other liberal media outlets. As we have now learned, the original video handed to Breitbart included only part of the Sherrod speech. It was best explained by Roger Mackey in a New York Times blog:
Ms. Sherrod and her supporters said the edited clip was misleading because the excerpts were taken from a longer story she told about overcoming prejudice and learning, from working with this white farmer, that her job was to help poor people regardless of their race. After the N.A.A.C.P. reviewed a longer tape of the speech (embedded at the top of this post), the group said in a statement posted on its Web site, “we have come to the conclusion we were snookered by Fox News and Tea Party Activist Andrew Breitbart,” the conservative blogger who drew attention to the speech.
The NAACP then backed down, releasing a statement indicating that after reviewing her entire speech and listening to the testimony of white farmers whom Sherrod actually helped, “the fact is Ms. Sherrod did help the white farmers mentioned in her speech. They personally credit her with helping to save their family farm. Moreover, this incident and the lesson it prompted occurred more than 20 years before she went to work for U.S.D.A.”
Sherrod, in her full speech, made it clear that what she was trying to convey was a change in her perspective, from seeing things only through the prism of race, when it was a matter of poor people of all colors needing help that was being denied them. She learned when “it was revealed to me that it’s about poor versus those that have and not so much – it is about white and black but, it opened my eyes because I took him to one of his own and I put him in his hands and felt, O.K., I’ve done my job.” The white farmer then had his farm foreclosed.
The white lawyer Sherrod had sent him to did not help stop the foreclosure, but told the farmer to let the farm go. At that point, Sherrod sprung to his defense and went on to help him save his farm. From this experience she learned “it’s really about those who have versus those who don’t … And it made me realize then that I needed to work to help poor people, those who don’t have access the way others have.”
After finally hearing her story, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack promised to review the decision asking for her resignation. But there is more. On CNN, Sherrod told the story of how Undersecretary of Agriculture Cheryl Cook called her three times as she was driving to clients in Athens, Georgia, a three and a half hour car drive. “They asked me to resign, and in fact they harassed me as I was driving back to the state office from West Point, Georgia, yesterday,” she said. The last call “asked me to pull to the side of the road and do it [resign],” she said. The undersecretary told her that the White House wanted her to resign, because “you’re going to be on Glenn Beck tonight.”
The irony is that Glenn Beck did not show the video on his program at all that day. On the following day’s program, Beck came on the air — before the full video of Sherrod’s entire March speech had been made available by Breitbart and by the NAACP — and told his program’s viewers that Sherrod “shouldn’t have been fired.” Why, Beck asked, would they force a resignation based on a 24-year-old incident that might have been “taken entirely out of context”?
As for Breitbart, we have to ask: Who gave him the incomplete video? Why didn’t he ask whether the entire speech was in the clip? Not having done that, it was clearly irresponsible for him to run it. Perhaps it was a setup. At any rate, he should have asked for the complete speech before releasing it, since the subsequent rush to judgment — including the forced resignation of Sherrod — was the result. Breitbart appeared this morning on ABC’s Good Morning, America, where he said that:
The video shows racism and when the NAACP is going to charge the Tea Party with racism … I’m going to show you it happens on the other side. This is not about Shirley Sherrod. This is about the smears that have gone against the Tea Party. What this video clearly shows is a standard that the Tea Party has not been held to.
Indeed, Breitbart refused to back down from what he said was simply his intent to show the double standard applied to the Tea Party, and he refused to apologize for showing the incomplete video that cost Sherrod her job. “They were clapping racist behavior,” he said of the audience who heard her speech. Refusing to apologize, he said “the audience showed racism.”
The NAAP acknowledged that they were “snookered by Fox News and Andrew Breitbart,” and apologized for their condemnation of Sherrod and asking for her removal. Breitbart, having now seen the entire speech, should do the same. Sherrod herself blamed the NAACP for throwing her to the wolves, without calling her and even looking at the video, which they had.
As CNN’s Campbell Brown told NAACP chief Benjamin Jealous:
I don’t believe you were snookered. You allowed yourself to be snookered and you’re the ones to blame here because you had the tape in your possession and you could have easily watched it and known the full context of her remarks. You didn’t have to take your information solely from these conservative bloggers you now say snookered you.
As for Fox News, the Special Report with Bret Baier did not show the video, and on the panel, Charles Krauthammer said she should not have been dismissed and was owed an apology. Moreover, Shepard Smith, who anchors the 7 o’clock news show, called Andrew Breitbart’s website one that is “widely discredited” and posts “inaccurate” videos “edited to the point where the world was deceived.” So Fox News as a whole not only came off guilt-free, one of its anchors even blasted Andrew Breitbart. Yet Sherrod herself told Media Matters, the left-wing media-watch site, that “Fox News would like to take us [African-Americans] back to…where black people were looking down…not looking white people in the face, not being able to compete for a job, and not be a whole person.” Talking for the network, Baier said, “Mrs. Sherrod, that is just not true.”
Clearly Sherrod, although she herself had blamed the NAACP for not checking out the small edited video clip, now joined in the same spurious attack on Fox as the civil rights organization previously had done. Yet some on Fox News were guilty of a rush to judgement — particularly Fox News top rated pundit Bill O’Reilly, who showed the incomplete and misleading video and demanded on the air that Sherrod be fired. So did Sean Hannity, who called it “just the latest in a series of racial incidents.” Newt Gingrich then told him that firing here “for viciously racist attitudes was exactly the right thing to do.”
Both of them did not consider that the tape might have been incomplete. But even more guilty is the White House, whose pressure — which of course they deny having been made — resulted in the secretary of Agriculture’s demand that she be removed from the job. Why would the administration not phone Sherrod, ask for her side of the story, and first ask for the video of the complete speech before acting? Is it that because having branded the Tea Party as racist, they clearly could not afford to look like they were allowing someone who appeared to be a black racist to stay on the job, after she confessed in a speech how she did not help a white farmer?
As we learned tonight, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack blamed himself, said it was all his own fault, and exonerated the White House completely, although he previously noted that the demand she be fired came from the president. Now, he noted that the White House had asked him to apologize, and to quickly offer Mrs. Sherrod her job back.
The New York Times report noted: “Ms. Sherrod took to the airwaves on Tuesday, especially CNN, where she said that the N.A.A.C.P. was ‘the reason why this happened.’ ‘They got into a fight with the Tea Party, and all of this came out as a result of that,’ she said. Mr. Breitbart reached a similar conclusion, though from a different perspective. ‘They’re trying to make this about me and Shirley Sherrod. This is about the N.A.A.C.P.,’ he said by phone. He said that the civil rights group had ‘spent an inordinate amount of airtime trying to brand the Tea Party as racist’ while tolerating racism itself.”
Breitbart is partially correct. The NAAcP has shown its irrelevance many times, trying to act as if the U.S. is still in the segregated 40s and 50s, when it was a necessary and major civil rights organization with a mission to complete. It has a stake in charging racism where it no longer exists. But the organization’s head acknowledged he was disturbed about the audience reaction when Sherrod was accounting her first response of not wanting to help a white farmer, and pledged to look into it. Breitbart is also right that the group snookered itself, and it was not his fault. But this is not an excuse for his own failures. He too must apologize for putting out a video without checking whether or not it was complete, and considering what it might do to Sherrod.
It was not simply about the Tea Party. Thus, David Frum is correct when he writes: “There will be no apology or statement of regret for distributing a doctored tape to defame and destroy someone. There will be not even a flutter of interest among conservatives in discussing Breitbart’s role. By the morning of July 21, the “Fox & Friends” morning show could devote a segment to the Sherrod case without so much as a mention of Breitbart’s role. The central fact of the Sherrod story has been edited out of the conservative narrative, just as it was edited out of the tape itself.” So this conservative is not writing Breitbart out of the narrative. He too must apologize and admit his error. If he does not, and persists in saying it is just about the Tea Party, he only hurts his own credibility and reputation. Sometimes those with the best of intentions can become their own worst enemy.
Update: Thursday, July 22, 10:04 am, EST
I cannot answer each of my critics directly, but their points are the same: Breitbart does not owe an apology; the NAACP and the Left are exclusively at fault; Shirley Sherrod is a Marxist or perhaps even a communist; etc etc etc. Here is my response:
Last night, even Bill O’Reilly apologized to Sherrod for running the Breitbart released video and for not putting her comments in their entire context. Is O’Reilly now also a tool of the Left? Hardly, and he did the right thing. Breitbart, after hearing the NAACP’s attacks on the Tea Party, rememebered he had asked for the relevant parts of the video (not the entire speech) and then saw it, and released it to prove that the NAACP itself was playing a racist card. That means he responded with his own one-sided and misleading racial card, without trying to see if Sherrod’s entire comment proved his point.
Virtually everyone who has watched the speech, even Charles Krauthammer, notes that her speech was one of inspiration and reconciliation. Despite the horror of having her own father murdered by the Klan and a cross burned on their lawn in 1965, Sherrod calls for all of us working together, and transcending racial appeals. It is, as many have pointed out, an American story—not a racial story preached by the racial hucksters of the Left. True, at times she contradicts herself. In my blog entry, I included her own misguided statements about Fox News to Media Matters, and said she was wrong and losing her own high ground. But she has not repeated this on the numerous other programs she has been on.
The simple reason Andrew Breitbart owes an apology is this: He alone released the edited video- that did not include the rest of Sherrod’s story, in which she shows how her original reaction was wrong and how she moved on, and then helped the white farmer as best as she could- thereby indeed saving him from foreclosure and saving his farm. He and his wife have been Sherrod’s friends since then. Breitbart now says over and over “They made it about her,” as he did on a TV interview. No, HE made it about her, by releasing the misleading video. If he refuses to own up to his mistake, he has then squandered any credibility he may have had. So, I repeat: Andrew, apologize to her and to all of us.
Dum, de dum dum.
>>Breitbart AND Obama acted stupidly.<<
There’s the money quote. And let’s be frank here. We hold the president to a higher standard than a blogger. You can say and do things sitting on a bar stool or writing on a web page that are simply several notches below what would be acceptable coming from the white house.
Remember Bush? His loyalty to his people sometimes annoyed us. Obama demonstrated here that he will throw his own under the bus at even a hint that it could harm him. He got seriously burned here. It is almost as if Brietbart was willing to damage his own reputation to catch Obama - a martydom of sorts.
I don’t believe that is the case, but the results were the same. ;)
I’m a white male heterosexual. I already know that my government, and the bigots that staff it, believe in their hearts that I deserve to be hobbled.
I must be restricted. I must be held down. I must not be allowed to compete on their “even playing field”.
In order to achieve equality for all, they must handicap me!
Fine, handicap me for now, but I will still invent the future. Maybe next time we’ll choose not to invite you to live in it with us.
It wasn't about Sherrod. The story was NEVER about Sherrod. The NAACP made a statement about the racist Tea Party. This tape exposed their reaction to a racist story where they hooted, hollered and applauded a white farmer being dissed by a Black person. It had NOTHING to do with Sherrod, who is STILL a racist, and everything to do with the racism of the NAACP. By focusing on Sherrod, the story of the NAACP's racism is being buried.
Breitbart didn’t “emphasize” anything. The meaning of the tape was in the eye of the beholder...and those who beheld it .....fired HER for it.
Breitbart ONLY said the tape showed racism. He didn’t ever say it was Sherrod who was racist.
>>Where did you getthe $13 million figure? The amount was 300 K.
I believe her settlement was bundled together with others in her co-op with a total value of $13 million.
I’d like to know more about that whole deal, and how she came to be working for the same agency right afterward.
Because if you read the original story, which may be found here, it says nothing about the NAACP's reaction. Breitbart makes the story CLEARLY about this Sherrod woman, nothing more. He says...
"In this piece you will see video evidence of racism coming from a federal appointee and NAACP award recipient and in another clip from the same event a perfect rationalization for why the Tea Party needs to exist."Nowhere in the Brietbart piece does he make mention of the crowd's reaction, as you assert. The article is wholly and plainly about her speech. Moreover, the story that is excerpted is not about her behavior while she was a federal employee, but a recounting of something that she was involved with while working for an NGO. Brietbart obfuscates this fact.-snip- We are in possession of a video from in which Shirley Sherrod, USDA Georgia Director of Rural Development, speaks at the NAACP Freedom Fund dinner in Georgia. In her meandering speech to what appears to be an all-black audience, this federally appointed executive bureaucrat lays out in stark detail, that her federal duties are managed through the prism of race and class distinctions.
Lastly, if you read the entire speech, it's clear to anyone with half a brain, that she telling a cautionary tale about judging people on their color of their skin, when it should be about judging people on their individual circumstance. She's being circumspect in the recounting of the story.
Brietbart completely mischaracterizes and clearly takes out of context, the excerpts he comments on to further the point he's trying to make.
Liberals take Rush Limbaugh and other conservatives out of context all the time, and it's wrong. It's just as wrong here, irrespective of what Sherrod's other political positions may be.
I guess they are now even.
“Why are so many Freepers missing that this was never about Sherrod?”
Because for all they say about the lame stream, some people still don’t get it.
The first day this video was released, he explained how it had come to his possession. When it ran, it ran to the point she starts talking about it 'not being about race, well it is about race, but also about haves, and have nots', (I paraphrase). It's clear she begins to back away from her race-baiting, all though it appears to be a mealy-mouthed attempt. I'm pretty sure when it ran on Hannity, it ran to that point as well.
Not so sure if you can trust all of this, but TPM has a pretty good wrap-up of this story (if you can read just for facts):
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/07/shirley_sherrod_and_the_discrimination_of_black_fa.php?ref=fpa
None of the money awarded in any of the Pigford Farms settlements has actually been received by any of the plaintiffs.
I didn’t know until this morning that Sherrod’s FATHER was shot in the back and killed back in 1965 under mysterious circumstances by a “white farmer.” That is what her discussion of “45 years ago” meant in her full speech - she was describing how God helped her move past her fear and her own anger at white people.
It’s actually a very moving testimony. Too bad that Breitbart only had the small clip - the whole speech is excellent.
Missed the point of the tape did ya? The NAACP issued a statement about racist elements in the Tea Party. The tape shows the racists at the NAACP laughing and applauding Sherrods racist story. It was NEVER about Sherrod but about the racist NAACP.
Hm. So according to you, would the "real" conservative position be to refuse to recognize, much less admit that Breitbart left a monumental pile of stinking crap on our collective doorstep?
Breitbart's dishonesty is precisely what we rightly excoriate the MSM for doing. Breitbart was very much in the wrong. He needs to own up to his mistake.
And so do you, apparently.
Gotcha. Good point. Yeh, the gruel and bread diet is going to be tough. But, hey, at least we can say we took the high road. Golly if that aint something.
Until then, I will sit here and bite my nails, watch the Rasmussen polls and make some shiny new tea party signs. Maybe I'll put glitter on my new ones.
This is what Sherrod concludes:
“But where am I going with this? You know, I couldn’t say 45 years ago — I couldn’t stand here and say what I’m saying — what I will say to you tonight. Like I told you, God helped me to see that it’s not just about black people — it’s about poor people. And I’ve come a long way. I knew that I couldn’t live with hate, you know. As my mother has said to so many, “If we had tried to live with hate in our hearts, we’d probably be dead now.”
But I’ve come to realize that we have to work together and — you know, it’s sad that we don’t have a room full of white and blacks here tonight, ‘cause we have to overcome the divisions that we have. We have to get to the point where, as Toni Morrison said, “Race exists but it doesn’t matter.” We have to work just as hard. I know it’s — you know, that division is still here, but our communities are not going to thrive — you know, our children won’t have the — the communities that they need to be able to stay in and live in and — and have a good life if we can’t figure this out, you all. White people, black people, Hispanic people, we all have to do our part to make our communities a safe place, a healthy place, a good environment.”
How is she a racist?
“a Tea Party activist falsely accused the NAACP of racism”
What actual evidence do you have that it is a false accusation? All the videotaped evidence I’ve seen (including the 45 minute full video and her subsequent accusations against Breitbart and Fox on TV) confirms her racist (and marxist) world view.
DO you have some other evidence we don’t know about?
After viewing the entire speech and the text [minus the unexpained gaps in the video/audio], the excerpt by Breitbart did not misrepresent the racism of this woman. She is a racist, clear and simple.
Breitbart: It's Not About Shirley Sherrod; It's About NAACP attacking Tea Party
Lastly, if you read the entire speech, it's clear to anyone with half a brain, that she telling a cautionary tale about judging people on their color of their skin,
Is that why she said "My people" didn't even ask blah blah blah?
Saint Shirley Sherrod: Shut Down BigGovernment.com for Good of the Country - Kristinn
This woman is a marxist racist. Stop crying for her.
Thread winner!
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