Rep. Grayson, do us a favor and speak up today about the injustice that was done to Ms. Sherrod, a good person who has devoted her life to helping others, black and white in her native state of Georgia, especially if President Obama or Secretary Vilsack or anyone else in the Democratic Party leadership will not do so. You have shown you have the guts to speak out against these sorts of right wing smears merchants like Andrew Breitbbart. Too many Democratic officials still will not. They still cower in fear of the power of the smear merchants on the right.
I watched the Rachel Maddow show last night and saw the clip from the Spooner family, the white couple who Sherrod helped keep their farm back in the 1980’s when she worked with a private NGO helping poor farmers. Here is what Mr and Mrs. Spooner had to say about her:
Sherrod said Tuesday that the incident with the farmer in 1986 occurred before she started work for the USDA and was working at the nonprofit Federation of Southern Cooperatives. She said the experience helped her learn to move beyond race and she tells the story to audiences to make that point.
Meanwhile, the farmer referenced in the clip told CNN he credits Sherrod with helping his family save their farm.
“I don’t know what brought up the racist mess,” Roger Spooner told CNN’s “Rick’s List.” “They just want to stir up some trouble, it sounds to me in my opinion.”
Spooner says Sherrod accompanied him and his wife to a lawyer in Americus, Georgia, who was able to help them file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, which ultimately saved their farm.
“If it hadn’t been for her, we would’ve never known who to see or what to do,” he said. “She led us right to our success.”
Spooner’s wife, Eloise, remembered Sherrod as “nice-mannered, thoughtful, friendly; a good person.”
She said that when she saw the story of the tape and Sherrod’s resignation on television, “I said, ‘That ain’t right. They have not treated her right.’ “
It wasn’t right but when has that ever stopped Breitbart or Drudge or FOX or Limbaugh from defaming good people to advance their agenda? They wanted to attack the NAACP after that organization’s resolution condemning racism in the Tea Party. The fact that Ms. Sherrod was an employee of the Obama administration was a bonus for them. Ms. Sherrod could be made to appear to be a “black woman who hated white people and refused to help them” by taking her remarks from a speech she gave to the NAACP out of context and implying that she and the Obama administration was deliberating discriminating against poor white people.
The trouble was no one on Vilsack’s staff or at the White House stood up for her. No one on our side gave her the benefit of the doubt or waited to investigate the claims of people that we and they know to be liars, con artists and propagandists who distort the facts with little concern for the consequences to the lives of the people they set out to destroy. In short they acted as if the accusations of known sociopaths and defamation specialists were the gospel truth before even bothering to fact check those claims. Even the NAACP fell for this trap, afraid to tarnish their precious reputation. At least they have now apologized to her.
And what about the white people who Sherrod supposedly shafted according to Breitbart and Fox? Apparently the NAACP and Vilsack couldn’t be bothered to track them down or to get Ms. Sherrod’s side of the story.
I don’t know what surprised me more: Vilsack’s and the NAACP’s hasty move to condemn based her on the charges made by FOX News and Breitbart or the fact that CNN actually practiced some real journalism and found the people who Ms. Sherrod allegedly abused because of her racism.
Here’s a link to Anderson Cooper’s CNN’s interview with Mr. Spooner.
And here’s the You Tube clip with the Spooners being interviewed by Rick Sanchez about Shirley Sherrod, and also his interview with Ms. Sherrod:
The NAACP has apologized for its failure to investigate Breitbart and Fox News’ claims before jumping to conclusions and President Obama and Tom Vilsack should do the same: admit their mistake and reinstate her. Immediately and publicly.
And any Democrat who in the future responds to “stories” coming out of Breitbart’s little media empire should be in the future should make a point to emphasize his past record of lies and omissions in order to advance his own agenda before accepting any part of those stories as truthful. At this point the burden of proof should be on Breitbart and Fox News and anyone else who propagates these “edited” tapes he conjures up and any news organization should not run a Breitbart generated story until a thorough fact checking of his organization’s “work” has been completed.
We know what Andrew Breitbart is: a manipulative bastard who delights in playing the media and causing trouble and stirring up racial division in this country. He is a person who isn’t a journalist though he pretends to be one. What he is is far more insidious: a malevolent and malicious individual who has learned that the major corporate news media can be “played” to cover a story the way you want it covered if you know how to push the right buttons:
One thing Breitbart will say about Drudge, though, is that his mentor introduced him to Arianna Huffington, then a right-wing pundit and Drudge confidant. Breitbart became her researcher and Web guru. By her side, he learned that the media could be more than scooped — it could be hacked. The first exploit was almost an accident: In September 1998, he suggested that Drudge and Huffington go to the embezzlement trial of former Clinton business associate Susan McDougal. The Los Angeles Times took note of their attendance the next day in a headline and a few sentences in the Metro section. Publicists have been pulling similar tricks since silent-movie days, sending celebrity clients to public events. But to Breitbart, the move was a revelation. “You can play the media. You can force them to cover things,” he says. “This is not just stenography. There’s a performance art to it.”
You see, Breitbart himself knows what he does, and it’s not journalism, and it isn’t performance art either though that’s the egotistical label he prefers. What he is is is a shit stirrer, plain and simple. He makes his money through the deliberate manipulation of lazy journalists.
His job is to provide the controversy du jour for Fox News. Fox then relies upon and points to him as a legitimate source of the “fair and balanced news” they report (i.e., propaganda, fraudulent claims, lies, and ginned up controversies). That is, they use Breitbart’s work product to amplify and spread a message of hate and division, allowing millions of Americans, who already are inclined to believe the “stories” (and by stories I mean fictions) he concocts to generate outrage and satisfy their own worldview, one in which anyone who is to the left of Sarah Palin is a leftist, socialist destroyer of our way of life, as well as a possible criminal, racist or whatever other label comes in handy to attack their designated enemies.
In short Breitbart is a parasite and symbiont, the remora which rides on the back of sharks like Drudge and FOX NEWS and Rush Limbaugh. It’s a nasty way to make a living but one he seems to relish:
For someone who claims to hate the “Democrat-media complex,” Breitbart sure knows how to work it. Few people are better at packaging information for maximum distribution and impact. He is, depending on whom you ask, either the “leading figure in this right-wing creation of a parallel universe of lies and idiotic conspiracy theories” (that was liberal critic Eric Boehlert of Media Matters for America) or “the most dangerous man on the right today” (from Michael Goldfarb, Republican consultant and former campaign aide to John McCain). Breitbart is, in short, expert in making the journalism industry his bitch. “The market has forced me to come up with techniques to be noticed,” Breitbart says. “And now that I have them, I’m like, wow, this is actually great. This is fun.”
As Ms. Maddow said last night this isn’t really news. We’ve known since at least the phony ACORN tapes he doctored and released that this is Breitbart and Fox News’ modus operandi: He selectively edits a tape of his designated “villain” then publishes it (which in the case of the ACORN affair may end up causing him a host of legal woes) and Fox News and right wing blogs run with the “controversy” before anyone can verify his claims. Later we discover that almost everything he published is a lie, or made to appear something that it is not.
No the real news is that Democrats are still falling for his little gambits, so afraid of being called racist or socialist or criminal or whatever that they immediately disavow the person or organization Breitbart and his fellow travelers on the right have defamed.
Via George Stephanopoulos Ms. Sherrod has been told Agricukture Secretary Vilsack is reconsidering her dismissal after he (and unknown Obama officals?) acted “hastily” in response to the deceitful and manipulative hack job by Andrew Breitbart and Fox News which selectively edited comments from a speech she gave to the NAACP this March to make her appear a racist:
Sherrod has not heard from Vilsack or President Obama since the tape was released on the conservative website Biggovernment.com. She said she found out that Vilsack was reevaluating her dismissal at 5:30am when someone read his statement to her.
“I’m a bit disappointed that things happened in the way they happened. It doesn’t take away my support for the administration,” she said. “When I accepted the position at rural development, always in the back of my mind was doing the very best that I could to have that be a good reflection on [Obama] and what he was trying to do.”
If she could do it again Sherrod told me she might not tell her story about the white farmer the same way but her message would be the same.
“The message I was getting out there to them is the same message I want everyone to know, anyone I would speak to…I use my life, I grew up in a segregated society, to show how I could move beyond that,” she said.
So, to repeat myself: Rep. Grayson, do us a favor and speak up today about this injustice that was done to Ms. Sherrod, a good person who has devoted her life to helping others, black and white in her native state, especially if President Obama or Secretary Vilsack or anyone else in the Democratic Party leadership will not do so. At least you have the guts to speak out against these sorts of smears. Too many Democratic officials still will not oppose these evil men and women (and yes, what they are doing is evil). They still cower in fear of the power of the smear merchants on the right.
