More on the Sherrod story
Hard to know which is stranger: a modern-era White House, with all the technology in the world at its disposal, assenting to (orchestrating, perhaps) the firing of Agriculture Department official Shirley Sherrod before it knew all the pertinent facts, or the pundits at MSNBC wringing their hands over the ills of 24/7 punditry on stories like Sherrod’s. It’s a jump ball.
For whatever reason the Obama administration swallowed the initial, distorted view of video in which Sherrod, who is black, appeared to be telling an audience about discriminating against a white farmer 24 years ago. Sherrod was summarily cashiered, even as the administration stews over dwindling support from independents and whites. Turns out, the video (initially circulated by a conservative blogger) was badly edited. Sherrod actually told the story from her past to illustrate the need for equal treatment for all. Oops.
So that’s pretty crazy, but maybe not as crazy as a group of political gadflies talking about the risks inherent in round-the-clock gadfly-ery. In the midst of the Sherrod story there was considerable harrumphing from the furrowed brows on Joe Scarborough’s “Morning Joe” show. Which is ironic, since panels like that eat political scandal for breakfast, baked or half-baked. The moral of the story: Everyone should be more careful, especially those who hire and fire, as well as folks who covet ratings off juicy controversy.
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Mark Green doesn’t even mention Fox News in his comment. Fox News bloviators aren’t racist but they know what to do to motivate their base… Stir up the pot of racial animosty and resentment towards minorities.
It has worked in the past and they are hoping it will work in the mid-terms. Go back to Ronald Reagan’s ‘Black welfar queens driving around in Cadillacs’ and Geoge HW Bush’s Willie Horton ads, the implications of which was that if you vote for Dukakis your white daughters will be raped and killed by menacing looking black thugs.
Form the Rev Wright, to Acorn, to the new Black Panther scandal they run edited and distorted clips appealing to their base’s instincts.
Ever wonder why Fox News never runs clips 24/7 on whit groups behaiving badly?
The ‘teaching moment’ in this scandal is that independants now know exactly what Fox News agenda is and will turn away from racism. They went too far this time and were caught with their pants down.
And here’s the video proof of Fox News agenda of stirring the pot racial animosity and resentment of its viewer base none of it taken out of context. Apologies everywhere but none coming from Roger Ailes Fox’s CEO:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/23/fox-news-shirley-sherrod_n_657512.html
As a 17 year-old growing up in Georgia, Shirley Sherrod experienced the worst kind of racial violence when her father was killed over a minor dispute with a white farmer, a reputed Klansman. Even though there were three witnesses, the grand jury in Baker County, GA did not indict the murderer. In those days (1965) in Baker County white men were never even brought to trial for killing a black man. Just months after her father’s death, three members of the Ku Klux Klan burned a cross on the lawn of her home; inside the home was her family including her newborn brother who would never see his father.
On the night of her father’s death, Shirley prayed for guidance when she realized that this tragedy could lead her to “live a life of hate.” Guidance came in the form of a choice: she could give up her dream of moving north (where she thought racism didn’t exist) and stay in the South and dedicate her life to change, which she did.
This is the story of transformation that Shirley Sherrod told at the NAACP meeting last March. This is the context, in which she testified to another personal epiphany, when in 1986, Roger Spooner, whose farm was about to be foreclosed, asked Shirley for help. Mr. Spooner was the first white farmer to approach Shirley for assistance. The power of hate radio and Fox >news is frightening.