New Mexico Central

The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly

by John Weckerle

It is perhaps an ultimate expression of Murphy’s Law  that we were putting the finishing touches on a long article on people playing the racism card when the Shirley Sherrod story broke.  That article will have to wait for now, as the current issue seems more pressing, and perhaps drives home a point we were trying to make in that article far better than we could have hoped.

Ms. Sherrod was subjected to national humiliation and loss of her job after administration officials viewed a video on biggovernment.com, published by Andrew Breitbart.  That video purportedly showed that Ms. Sherrod, an African American speaking at a National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) event, not only was a racist, but actually discriminated against white people in the course of performing her work for the United States Department of Agriculture.  It turns out that the video was heavily edited and that the original speech was essentially the opposite of what was being portrayed.  No surprise, there; it was, after all, Andrew Breitbart, and we’ve debunked him here before on the issue of phony claims associated with Senator Robert Byrd (here and here). In an interview with CNN, Mr. Breitbart angrily defended his actions stating that they were in response to the NAACP’s accusations that the “Tea Party” was tolerant of racism at its rallies.

As with the Byrd situation, conservative bloggers nationwide, including our friends at Gadabout-Blogalot.com, immediately and in some cases gleefully relayed the story, with embedded video “proof” that the NAACP was racist because one of its members made racist comments at one of their events.  (The irony is hard to miss; the NAACP is racist because somebody made a “racist” speech at one of their functions, but it is outrageous to suggest that the “Tea Party” is racist because a number of their rallies have included people waving signs with racist overtones and some highly-visible organizers have made bigoted comments.)  This has become a common tactic over the last several years – somebody makes an accusation of one inappropriate behavior or other, and the response is to accuse that party of the same behavior.  Seldom does the response deal with the substance of the original accusation.  It is, to most of us, rather transparent and more than a little childish – the phrase “I know you are, but what am I?” comes to mind – but there is a certain percentage of the population that seems to buy into this approach.  I, myself, have been publicly denounced as a racist for criticizing Mr. Breitbart’s position that African American congressmen walking through a white crowd was race-baiting.  I wouldn’t be surprised if I’m accused of it again in response to this article. Regardless, we’ve taken issue with Mr. Breitbart’s distorted reporting in the past, and we hope that this incident will be a wake-up call to those who have been happily consuming and passing on the dreck that comes out of his mouth, or keyboard, as the case may be. But that is not what this article is about. »» The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly

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