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.
What this article is about is the continued nastiness that seems to be dominating the political discourse at this time. We’ve published articles about this before, but the issue doesn’t seem to be getting much traction. Let’s try it again, perhaps more strongly this time.
I want each and every blogger, “journalist,” and word-of-mouther who passed this story along to try and create an image in his or her mind. It may not be an accurate one, but it may be helpful. I want you to picture Ms. Sherrod seeing Mr. Breitbart’s video for the first time, seeing her story of personal redemption turned into a video of her as a despicable racist. I want you to try very hard to imagine the sense of horror, the hole in the middle of her chest, when she saw this despicable thing. I want you to try and envision the look on her face when she was fired, very publicly, from her job. I want you to imagine the disgrace she must have felt, clearing out her office, her colleagues and co-workers – every one of whom had certainly seen the Breitbart video, but not the unedited one – looking on. I want you to try very hard to consider the effect that this has had on all Ms. Sherrod’s relationships. And finally, I want you to fix in your mind an image of Ms. Sherrod, sobbing inconsolably in the middle of the night, because her life had been shattered by this horrendous lie concocted simply as a bit of political nastiness.
Then I want you to understand that you helped.
I have done a few (hopefully very few) things in my life for which no apology is sufficient, and for which forgiveness on the part of person on the receiving end is likely neither forthcoming nor deserved. One of the things I try to bring out of such actions is a resolution to try not to do whatever it was again. I should hope that those who have been vilifying those with whom they disagree to consider that it is best to focus on the subject of the disagreement rather than tearing down the opposing party.
I’d also like to see people stop citing Mr. Breitbart as an authority. Mr. Breitbart has made great hay over the fact that nobody has a recording of certain events (although perhaps we might now wonder if his editing has done him some good there, too), seeming to establish video as the definitive proof of things. In our opinion, recent events have exposed Mr. Breitbart for what he is – a manipulative, dishonest media phony, pursuing his own goals with neither ethics nor honor. And we all have the video to prove it.