Gettysburg Address 'outrage' provides handy checklist of stupidest people in America & The Hatriots' Revolution Has Begun (They claim to have the authority to shoot Obama) 19NOV13

Hate is too great a burden to bear. It injures the hater more than it injures the hated.
- Coretta Scott King

CONTINUING to prove they are stupid, as are the people who revel in their own ignorance and believe this B.S., here is the latest outrage inflicted on the nation by the Obama administration. Bang on faux news and all you other morons, and be sure to forward this scandal all you right wing zombies. From Daily Kos, followed by the christian american patriots facebook page post from 19NOV13, on which they state "We now have the authority to shoot Obama, i.e. to kill him.".....

You're kidding, right?

The anniversary of the Gettysburg Address does not seem at first glance to be a subject steeped in controversy, but that is because you are not a dull-minded hack whose quest for new controversies must never fall below the speed of 50 miles per hour, lest the whole movement die.

Obama Snubs 150th Anniversary of Gettysburg Address

I'm going to spare you the actual article under that headline. I first saw the premise being propped up yesterday as a prospective "scandal" when it slithered past in a Twitter stream via the apparently-still-around Breitbart conspiracy site. I did not think much of it, because I am not a shit-for-brains, but apparently I misunderestimated just how obsessively Actual Conservative Pundits troll the conspiracy sites for fodder. Fox & Friends took it up this morning, and if that isn't ironclad proof that the story passes nicely under the you-must-be-this-stupid-to-enter bar than nothing is.

Fox News's Brian Kilmeade discussed with Wall Street Journal columnist Daniel Henninger whether it is "inappropriate for our president to bypass" the commemoration ceremony of the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address during the November 19 edition of Fox & Friends. At one point Kilmeade asked whether Henninger thought Obama was refusing to attend because "after that address and after the Civil War we still weren't a perfect union? We still had to wait for the Civil Rights Act and so many -- the integration of schools, Brown vs. the Board of Education?" Henninger replied, "I think probably that President Obama does think the unfinished business remains unfinished in bringing the country and its races together."

More on the "outrage" below the fold.

In "response" to tweeted questions by the two outlets peddling the story, resident White House moron wrangler Dan Pfeiffer cheekily suggested that the White House had other priorities. He once again neglected to recognize that morons do not understand sarcasm:

In response to a journalist's Twitter query about what could be more important, Pfeiffer wrote: "Oh, I don't know, there's this whole website thing that someone suggested might destroy the [Democratic] Party."

... which naturally led to actual goddamn stories suggesting that Obama did not go to Gettysburg because of Obamacarez. I suppose the main question here is which of these various shameless dunderhacks was the one who first came up with this as a plausible attack line—I am loathe to pin that on the Breitbart crowd when it could have been tossed over their transom by an even more eager shit-for-brains, or perhaps there is a collection of fabled shit-for-brains pundits that gets together each evening to determine who among them has the most foam-laden idea for an attack piece and they all clap their little hands together and run with it. That would mean all the others saw it floating around and said I believe I shall run with this, which makes them even more goddamn stupid and hackish than the original stupid hacks.
Now here is the key point, dear reader, and the reason why shit for brains ought not to be considered a crass insult at this point but merely a reasonable medical diagnosis. In all of American post-Lincoln history, only one sitting president has ever gone to Gettysburg on the anniversary of the address. Reagan did not go. The Bushii did not go. JFK did not go. Roosevelt never went, nor Nixon, nor President Biff the Unholy, Destroyer of Worlds. That honor apparently goes to Taft, and it has been a long damn time since anyone in the national press furrowed their brows and pondered what William Howard Taft would do in a given situation.
So no, we do not have to take any of this seriously. Nor do we have to take the purveyors of such obviously stupid faux-scandals seriously. Nor do we have to treat them with respect, or pretend for a bare minute that they have anything worthwhile to say about our political discourse that could not be better said by contemplating the contents of a litter box. The problem here is that there is no shame to be had in peddling conspiratorial trash in public. In better days people would cross to the other side of the street so that they would not have to listen to the nice man on the large box preaching about how President Obama is probably not attending the event only one other president in history (well, two, counting Lincoln himself) attended, and how that probably means the current president resents the tardiness of Brown v. Board of Education, and when a newspaper man walks up to that fellow with a notebook in hand, nodding and scribbling things down, that does not make it suddenly respectable. It only means there are two nuts standing on a street corner instead of one.
Cross to the other side, America. For the sake of pride and patriotism, will you just shun these damn people already?

Originally posted to Hunter on Tue Nov 19, 2013 at 11:00 AM PST.

Also republished by Daily Kos. 

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/11/19/1256769/-Gettysburg-Address-outrage-provides-handy-checklist-of-stupidest-people-in-America?detail=email 

The Hatriots' Revolution Has Begun

Today is the day! Clinton-hater has-been gadfly sociopath birther insurrectionist Larry Klayman and his Reclaim America Now Coalition have begun their Hatriots' Revolution. There are dozens--DOZENS--of people wandering around Lafayette Park in Washington, DC. They mean business. They have snakey flags and Confederate memorabilia. They are quoting the Founding Fathers. They even wrote a new Declaration of Independence.
The speeches thus far are pretty predictable. Barry Soetoro is a Kenyan Muslim usurper out to destroy our once great nation. The gun grabbers are coming. We are all terribly oppressed by ObamaCare. Benghaaaaaaaazi. America is on the brink of something really, really bad. Blah, blah, blah.
This isn't the event Klayman was hoping for. He wanted millions of people who would camp out in DC until President Obama resigned. (If he had an idea of the mechanism that would impel the President's resignation, he never shared it publicly.) But, even as he was promoting a massive, multi-day event, he knew he wasn't going to get millions and they weren't going to be staying overnight. According to the permit issued by the National Park Service, he expected 500 attendees, the demonstration would last from 10 am to 5 pm, and there would be no civil disobedience.
Livestreaming courtesy of the right-wing group Patriots Ride - Reclaim America is available here: http://www.ustream.tv/...
A few photos courtesy of @RightWingWatch

Despite their awesome show of force, I will make a bold and risky prediction: This event will not cause President Obama to resign from office. There. I said it. You can quote me. This is what I fervently believe. Edited to add: As several commenters have noted, this event took place in a national park. While these hypocrites were whining about the evils of socialism, they were lapping up the benefits of it, spewing their seditious blather on prime real estate within shouting distance of the White House.

 http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/11/19/1256648/-The-Hatriot-s-Revolution-Has-Begun?detail?detail=email

The Christian American Patriots Militia

JMG reader Steven sends us the above from the Facebook page of Christian American Patriots Militia. Note the hundreds of shares and the date of November 19th, which was the day of Larry Klayman's call for the beginning of "the second American revolution." From their Facebook page:

These rogues and thugs are in fact supplanting our Constitution with a communist Oligarchy of corrupt political and legal elites. Christian American patriots, this is no time to be silent nor to sit. (Romans 1:16) We must NOW RISE and FIGHT VIGOROUSLY to protect our nation and our posterity. Your children, grandchildren and great grandchildren depend on you. We need no further evidence that those we trusted are not honoring their oaths: Their oaths are not sacred to them---abusing us and disobeying God. Therefore, it is time that we remove them from their duties. It is time to act; and we pray that God give us guidance as we do.

 

The Year of the Big Lie: 6 Outrageous Falsehoods That Took Flight in 2010 31DEZ10

Thank God for media organizations like AlterNet and Mother Jones and PolitiFact and Salon and Politico, organizations committed to truth in reporting, not afraid to challenge and report on the shenanigans of the left and right.

From Breitbart's smear of Shirley Sherrod to Glenn Beck's use of Mein Kampf to malign George Soros, right-wing and mainstream media embrace the Big Lie. 

 

 

In a political year dominated by tales of polarization, a flurry of themes emerged as I contemplated the year just past -- the year of the Tea Party, the year that psycho became the new normal (Glenn Beck), the year in which info leaks rocked the world (WikiLeaks), the year that saw accomplishments defying conventional wisdom (Obama). But at the root of all of these themes lies the Lie; all other themes speak to either its advancement or in its defiance.
In the politics of 2010, the Big Lie, in both its gigantic and more attenuated forms, was almost always deployed in the service of corporations. It may not be so obvious at the surface, especially when the Lie dubs the nation's first black president a racist, or labels a Jewish holocaust survivor an anti-Semite, but the ultimate aim of the Lie in these contexts is to discredit purveyors of ideas and policies that certain corporate leaders and shills find threatening to their quest for all the world's riches.
What follows is a mere sampling of some of the defining lies of 2010, not presented in any particular order of importance, for they're all of a piece.
The Big Lie
The Big Lie theory goes like this: A gigantic, audacious lie is more likely to be believed by the masses than a small one if it is repeated often enough. First articulated in the pages of Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler (who attributed the practice, of course, to Jews) and deployed as a tactic by Nazi master propagandist Joseph Goebbels, the Big Lie went mainstream in 2010, as its propagators on the Right were accepted by big media as respectable articulators of a legitimate point of view. These include Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind., and numerous other Republican officials and Tea Party leaders who, in our first Big Lie, refer to the 2010 passage of health-care reform legislation as "a government takeover of health care." The non-partisan PolitiFact.com named this assertion the lie of the year -- an award that will likely have no impact on the issue's framing, since media figures generally fail to challenge the assertion when it's made.
Sometimes Big Lies are personal, targeting a figure whose appearance or background plays to the prejudices of a particular constituency. An attempt to lay just one such Big Lie to rest finds Neil Abercrombie, the newly elected Democratic governor of Hawaii, seeking to release data on the birth of President Barack Obama in his state 49 years ago in an effort to appease birthers -- those who have bought into the lie that Obama was born in Africa, not America, which would make him ineligible for the presidency. Really, Abercrombie needn't bother: the Tea Partiers who doubt the president's birthright will never be satisfied with any level of proof. They're far too invested in the lie.
Perhaps that's why Andrew Breitbart, the right-wing Web site impresario, author of our second Big Lie of the year, thought he could get away with targeting an unknown U.S. Department of Agriculture official, Shirley Sherrod, through the creative editing of a video taken of Sherrod's remarks to a local NAACP gathering.
Brietbart was ripping mad when the NAACP passed a resolution at its national convention that called on Tea Party leaders to repudiate racism within its ranks. The clip was edited to convey the opposite message of Sherrod's remarks, which addressed how she overcame her own prejudice against a white farmer she assisted in the course of her job duties. But before Breitbart's lie was exposed, the Obama administration fired Sherrod (who was later offered another job at USDA). The story immediately became about the video clip as Breitbart presented it, and Sherrod's firing. It wasn’t until the next day that the Lie was exposed.
Breitbart himself demonstrated little chagrin at having posted a distorted view of Sherrod's remarks -- after all, he had achieved much of his desired result: damage to the Obama administration. In rushing to fire Sherrod before an investigation could even begin, the administration signaled that Breitbart's Lie was truth.
In essence, Breitbart's Big Lie was of a particular sort: those designed to prove that one's opponent is guilty of the same sin of which your side stands accused. From the early days of the Tea Party movement in 2009, aided by Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, there's been a concerted attempt to paint Obama as a racist, a black man with "a deep-seated hatred for white people," in Beck's words. As a representative of the Obama administration and a speaker at an NAACP event, the Sherrod clip, had it not been exposed as a misrepresentation, would have killed two birds with one stone. Yet, even thus exposed, Breitbart remains an influential figure, the incident simply plowed, in an oily heap, to the side of the highway of hatred he travels.
Glenn Beck, of course, is the master of the Big Lie. That each lie Beck tells is more outrageous than the next does nothing to impede his success: in fact, his outrageousness fuels his success. Just last month, marking Big Lie number three for our purposes, Beck falsely accused the liberal financier George Soros of being a Nazi collaborator during World War II, when in fact, the Jewish Soros is a Holocaust survivor. In a three-part series on Soros, Beck framed his attack in language drawn from Hitler's Mein Kampf, calling his series "The Puppet Master," and referring to Soros as a "bloodsucker." While this caused great consternation in the progressive media world, protests in the world of mainstream media were not sustained enough to force Beck from his perch at Fox News, where he serves as community organizer for Rupert Murdoch, CEO of News Corporation, Fox's parent company.
Having made health-care reform his signature issue, Obama was ripe for this kind of attack from the likes of David Koch, the billionaire who founded Americans For Prosperity and FreedomWorks, which have actively promoted the Lie that Obama's insurance-company-friendly reform actually amounts to a government takeover of the health-care system. Like Murdoch, who is also a billionaire, Koch opposes government regulation of any kind -- be it of the health-care industry, the energy industry or the financial sector. Koch also happens to be a top executive at Koch Industries, the company founded by his father, a founder of the John Birch Society, that is rooted in the oil and gas sectors.
George Soros is also a billionaire, but one who favors government regulation, and puts his billions to work in the non-profit sector to fund organizations that support liberal efforts to regulate industry. So Soros became a prime target of the Big Lie.
The Little Big Lie
Perhaps the most pernicious outcome of society's resignation in 2010 to a media landscape blanketed by the Big Big Lie is the proliferation of smaller Big Lies which, taken in the context of enormous Big Lies, come to be seen as not such big deals. Take, for instance, Big Lie number four: the assertion by Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., founder of the House Tea Party Caucus, that Obama's recent trip to India was costing American taxpayers $200 million per day. Media dutifully quoted Bachmann's lie, some even noting that there was no evidence to support it. The media's interest sustained only as much as a 24-hour news cycle would allow. Just another instance of Bachmann being Bachmann.
Or take, for instance, the right-wing trope -- Big Lie number four -- that Obama cannot speak without a teleprompter, that he uses the teleprompter far more often than his predecessor, the verbally challenged George W. Bush. It matters not that Obama has proven, at news conference after news conference, that he does quite well answering questions off the cuff, or that his use of the teleprompter is on a par with that of previous presidents. In January 2010, Obama so deftly fielded questions lobbed at him by members of Congress at a Republican retreat that party leaders conceded it had been bad strategy for their side to allow the exchange to be televised. Yet Tea Partiers remain convinced that the black president is too stupid to speak without a machine scrolling text presumably written by white staffers.
And, coming in just under the wire for 2010 after having been an ongoing 2009 theme, thanks to Sarah Palin, is Big Lie number six: the notion that voluntary counseling for end-of-life care that is reimbursed by Medicare amounts to a government "death panel" designed to "pull the plug on Grandma."
The Media's Role
No Big Lie strategy can work without the dissemination of the Lie by mainstream media and in this regard, the media have been exemplary -- not in a wittingly conspiratorial way, but in a, gee-these-sensational-claims-will-really-boost-our-ratings kind of a way. After all, they too have corporate masters to serve.
The success of the whole Big Lie scheme, it seems, works here on something of a paradox. The rise of right-wing media, which is always the amplifier -- if not the creator -- of such claims, came to pass because of the distrust of mainstream media by a sizable chunk of the American public. However much that distrust existed throughout the history of the republic, it really picked up steam once network news was removed from its role, in the 1970s and '80s, as a public service provided by media entities that use public resources -- the airwaves -- as the vehicle for reaping profits, and news programs were made into profit centers by the corporations that owned the networks.
For their part, conservative personalities played on the jingoism of their adherents, especially during the Vietnam War, to claim that the media were hopelessly liberal in their bias, since they were reporting news that turned the American people against the war -- news, incidentally, that often exposed government lies about body counts and the ostensible success of the war. Daniel Ellsberg's historic leak of the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times brought such falsehoods into brutal relief, much as WikiLeaks did earlier this year with its release of communications and classified video from the war in Afghanistan.
Since the end of the Vietnam War, mainstream news producers and editors have been on the defensive, always needing to prove they're not biased toward liberals. This leads many mainstream outlets to pick up and amplify the themes advanced in right-wing media, while giving little play to those advanced in progressive media. Aiding this process is the fact that the messaging shops of the Right are more adept at framing issues in pithy and emotional ways.
Take the term "death panels." I'll bet you're thinking, what's that doing in a 2010 year-end piece? That's so 2009. Think again. Just this week, the term resurfaced with a vengeance when the New York Times reported that the Obama administration, having failed to win inclusion of coverage for end-of-life counseling in the health-care reform legislation that passed in March (largely thanks to the Right's death-panel framing), is changing Medicare regulations so that doctors will be reimbursed for offering the counseling.
In a segment of "Anderson Cooper 360" that aired on CNN this week, the introductory piece leading into a discussion of the new rules included, in the course of less than four minutes, nine mentions of the phrase "death panel" by the guest host and in clips of politicians discussing the subject (h/t, AlterNet SpeakEasy blogger Linda Milazzo). The graphic for the story read: "'Death Panel' Resurrection."
Congratulations, CNN. You are an accessory to the Big Lie.
Note that CNN is owned by AOL/Time Warner.
And take the postscript to the Breitbart/Sherrod episode. Was Andrew Breitbart hounded out of the polite company of mainstream media? Hardly. He was hired by ABC News to provide commentary on the midterm elections -- a deal that was canceled only after public outcry from media watchdogs.
Note that ABC News is owned by the Disney Corporation.
Newspapers are hardly immune to the pressures of the Big Lie, which often turns up in nuanced ways. In the final days of the battle for health-care reform, USA Today ran a front-page story headlined "Health care law too costly, most say."
Pounded by right-wing messengers, the conventional wisdom in Washington was that there was no public support for an optional public health-care plan, despite ample polling showing that indeed a majority of Americans supported a public option.
In fact, the very USA Today/Gallup poll on which that poll was based revealed continued majority support for a public option -- a fact that was mentioned nowhere in the text of the piece, but appeared only in a tiny graphic that ran alongside the text. Without stating the reasons that two-thirds of Americans thought the plan too costly, USA Today reporter Susan Page never articulated the fact that many of those Americans likely thought the law too expensive in light of the fact that it did not offer a publicly financed health-care plan, thus reinforcing the right's Big Lie.
Note that USA Today is owned by the Gannett Co., Inc., which owns 100 media entities, including newspapers and television stations.
All of the corporations mentioned here as parent companies of media outlets are publicly traded -- hence the lack of accountability to anybody other than shareholders. The axiom at local news stations has long been, "If it bleeds, it leads." Murder and mayhem hold the attention of viewers. In the world of mainstream national news, there's a new axiom taking hold: "If it lies, it flies" -- as long as the Lie is sensational enough to keep viewers tuned in. And the Right is genius at turning out just those sorts of lies.
Because the Big Lie relies not on facts for its impact, but the counter-factual, it cannot be refuted by empirical data. If progressives are to thwart the momentum of the Big Lie's suffocating expansion, they must offer a viable counter-narrative -- stories that speak to people's souls, emotions and experiences -- something more than a raft of facts and policy solutions. We know the true story of our people. We must learn how to tell it.

Commentary: Sherrod, Breitbart and the conservative outrage machine 27JUL10

By Leonard Pitts Jr. | The Miami Herald

Last week, the conservative outrage machine tried to chew up Shirley Sherrod.
You are familiar with that machine if you have access to the Internet or Fox News. As the name implies, it exists to stoke and maintain a state of perpetual apoplexy on the political right by feeding it a never-ending stream of perceived sins against conservative orthodoxy.
While the machine will use any available fuel (health care, immigration, Muslims) to manufacture fury, it has a special fondness for race. Specifically, for stories that depict the God-fearing white conservative as a victim of oppression.
So Sherrod must have seemed a godsend to blogger Andrew Breitbart.
Last Monday, he posted an excerpted video of Sherrod, an African-American employee of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, telling a NAACP audience how she once hesitated, because he was white, to help a farmer stave off bankruptcy. "Evidence of racism," Breitbart sniffs righteously in an accompanying post.
Except that it wasn't.
After the NAACP pronounced the video appalling, after Bill O'Reilly called her words unacceptable, and after the USDA demanded her resignation (all have since apologized) the truth came out, via the full video.
It turns out Sherrod is a daughter of Baker County, Ga., which she describes as having been the sort of proudly unreconstructed place where a black man might be murdered by a white one and despite three witnesses, the grand jury would decline to indict. In 1965, Sherrod's father was that black man, one of many.
So there she is in 1986, working at a nonprofit agency established to help farmers, and in comes this white farmer she finds condescending. She didn't do all she could've for him, she told the audience. Instead, she handed him off to a white lawyer, figuring one of "his own kind" would take care of him.
Which would indeed be appalling and unacceptable, except that when the white lawyer failed to help that farmer, Sherrod resolved to help him herself, to overcome the bitterness and bias of her own heart. That farmer credits her with saving his farm.
Breitbart used a snippet of video to misrepresent her as a black bureaucrat bragging of how she stuck it to the white man. Sherrod's point was actually about reconciliation, redemption, learning to embrace the wholeness of humanity.
Invited by CNN to explain the dissonance between his video and the truth, Breitbart chose instead to reiterate his charge of "racist" sentiment. For Breitbart, the video was an attempt to embarrass the NAACP, because it recently passed a resolution denouncing racist elements in the tea party movement. This is not about Sherrod, he insisted, though she might beg to differ.
In the interview, Breitbart came across as not overly concerned with truth, and much less with racial injustice, except insofar as it can be used to further his cause.
And isn't it telling how often conservatives will discover their burning concern over race just when it becomes useful to them? We saw this last year. In a nation where one state may soon require Latinos to show their papers, conservatives hyperventilated over the "racism" of Sonia Sotomayor extolling the virtues of a "wise Latina."
Now, against the backdrop of an Agriculture Department that long ago admitted to decades of discrimination against black farmers, Breitbart weeps over the "racism" of Shirley Sherrod refusing to assist a white farmer -- right up until she did.
It is probably useless to say Breitbart should be ashamed. There is little evidence he possesses the ability. But Sherrod is pondering a defamation suit, and a judgment in her favor might help him fix that defect.
May she win big. And may the outrage machine choke on the bill.
ABOUT THE WRITER
Leonard Pitts Jr., winner of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for commentary, is a columnist for the Miami Herald, 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, Fla. 33132. Readers may write to him via e-mail at lpitts@miamiherald.com. He chats with readers every Wednesday from 1 p.m. to 2 p.m. EDT at Ask Leonard.

Read more: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/07/27/98134/commentary-sherrod-breitbart-and.html#ixzz0uvThw9av

SHIRLEY SHARROD, WHAT SHE REALLY SAID 20JUL10

IF YOU WANT TO KNOW WHAT SHIRLEY SHERROD REALLY SAID HERE IT IS, AND EVEN BETTER WATCH THE INTERVIEW WITH THE SPOONER FAMILY FROM CNN. AT THE END OF THIS POST IS THE VIDEO OF SHIRLEY'S SPEECH, CLICK THE HEADER TO GO TO THE VIDEO POSTING ON MEDIA MATTERS.
This should be the thing that really scares the right wing media, the gop and the tea-baggers:




There's a couple of reverse racist dirty hippies for you.

SO, TO CONTINUE THE POST FROM HULLABALOO





You've all seen the edited Breitbart version of Shirley Sharrods speech by now. The full video has been released, so we can all hear the whole thing. And it's really quite wonderful.

You'll recall that the last words were

"That's when it was revealed to me that y'all, it's about poor versus those who have, and not so much about white -- it is about white and black, but it's not -- you know, it opened my eyes, 'cause I took him to one of his own ..."

Here's how it continued (via Media Matters)

'cause I took him to one of his own and I put him in his hands, and said, OK, I've done my job. But, during that time, we would have these injunctions against the Department of Agriculture and -- so, they couldn't foreclose on him. And I want you to know that the county supervisor had done something to him that I have not seen yet that they've done to any other farmer, black or white. And what they did to him caused him to not be able to file Chapter 12 bankruptcy.

So, everything was going along fine -- I'm thinking he's being taken care of by the white lawyer, then they lift the injunction against USDA in May of '87 for two weeks and he was one of 13 farmers in Georgia who received a foreclosure notice. He called me. I said, well, go on and make an appointment at the lawyer. Let me know when it is and I'll meet you there.

So we met at the lawyer's office on the day they had given him. And this lawyer sat there -- he had been paying this lawyer, y'all. That's what got me. He had been paying the lawyer since November, and this was May. And the lawyer sat there and looked at him and said, "Well, y'all are getting old. Why don't you just let the farm go?" I could not believe he said that, so I said to the lawyer -- I told him, I can't believe you said that. I said: It's obvious to me that he cannot file a Chapter 12 bankruptcy to stop this foreclose, you have to file an 11. And the lawyer said to me, I'll do whatever you say -- whatever you think -- that's the way he put it. But he's paying him. He wasn't paying me any money. You know, so he said -- the lawyer said he would work on it.

And then, about seven days before that man would have been sold at the courthouse steps, the farmer called me and said the lawyer wasn't doing anything. And that's when I spent time there in my office calling everybody I could think so to try to see -- help me find the lawyer who would handle this. And finally, I remembered that I had gone to see one just 40 miles away in Americus with the black farmers. So, I --

[tape change]

SHERROD: Well, working with him made me see that it's really about those who have versus those who don't.

AUDIENCE: That's right.

SHERROD: You know, and they could be black, and they could be white, they could be Hispanic. 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.

I want to just share something with you and I think it helps to -- you know, when I learned this, I'm like, oh, my goodness. You know, back in the late 17th and 18th century, black -- there were black indentured servants and white indentured servants, and they all would work for seven years and get their freedom. And they didn't see any difference in each other -- nobody worried about skin color. They married each other. You know, these were poor whites and poor blacks in the same boat, except they were slaves, but they were both slaves and both had their opportunity to work out on the slavery.

But then they started looking at the injustices that they faced and started then trying -- you know, the people with money -- you know, they started -- the poor whites and poor blacks -- they -- you know, they married each other. They lived together. They were just like we would be. And they started looking at what was happening to them and decided we need to do something about it -- you know, about this. Well, the people with money, the elite, decided, hey, we need to do something here to divide them.

So that's when they made black people servants for life. That's when the put laws in place forbidding them to marry each other. That's when they created the racism that we know of today. They did it to keep us divided. And they -- it started working so well, they said, gosh, looks like we've come up on something here that can last generations -- and here we are. Over 400 years later, and it's still working. What we have to do is get that out of our heads. There is no difference between us.

The only difference is that the folks with money want to stay in power and whether it's health care or whatever it is, they'll do what they need to do to keep that power.

[APPLAUSE]

[...]

[25:03] SHERROD: 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, God helped me to see that its 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 as Tony 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 communities that they need to be able to stay in and live in 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.

This is not a racist person. Quite the opposite.

But the right doesn't need that as a reason to hate her anyway. After all, she's talking about racial equality, solidarity among all working people and caring about the common good. What could possibly be more antithetical to everything they believe in?

You can see the full video here. 

Sherrod Scandal: Washington Post Finds It Impossible To Form Any Conclusions On The Incident & White House Apologizes To Shirley Sherrod 21JUL10

THIS QUOTE FROM THE BELOW STORY PRETTY MUCH SAYS IT ALL "And it's a pretty compelling story, made all the more so by the fact that when someone in the media finally had the bright idea of contacting the Spooner family -- the ostensible "victims" of "racism" -- they were quick to point out that Sherrod was a friend who saved their farm, she wasn't a racist, and that everyone saying so is an idiot."

The Shirley Sherrod affair is one of those stories that has absolutely no ambiguity to it. Alex Pareene basically captures what happened in the subhed of his authoritative explainer: "Andrew Breitbart lies about a USDA appointee, and a cowardly White House forces her out as a result."

That's basically it! We can all see for ourselves that Sherrod's speech, truncated to afford maximum hysteria, was actually a lengthy oration on Confronting Prejudices, and Overcoming Obstacles In Race Relations, and Personal Growth. And it's a pretty compelling story, made all the more so by the fact that when someone in the media finally had the bright idea of contacting the Spooner family -- the ostensible "victims" of "racism" -- they were quick to point out that Sherrod was a friend who saved their farm, she wasn't a racist, and that everyone saying so is an idiot.
This is, point blank, some of the least ambiguous shit in the whole wide world! But over at the Washington Post, they've been having this existential crisis of journalism, where no one knows if they are allowed to "have opinions" or "form conclusions" based on "extant immutable facts." Is it possible, really, to "know" anything anymore? Or are all the things we know merely two sides in a great debate?
That's their current mindset. And so it's not surprising that three Post reporters have conspired to craft a story in which no one is sure what is happening in America, or who is to blame.

A fuzzy video of an Agriculture Department official opened a new front Tuesday in the ongoing war between the left and right over which side is at fault for stoking persistent forces of racism in politics.

On the other hand, maybe that fuzzy video which wrongly implicated an innocent woman of racism was Andrew Breitbart's fault.

Shirley Sherrod, a black woman appointed last July as the USDA's Georgia state director of rural development, was forced to resign after a video surfaced of her March 27 appearance at an NAACP banquet. In a speech, she described an episode in which, while working at a nonprofit organization 24 years ago, she did not help a white farmer as much as she could have. Instead, she said, she sent him to one of "his own kind."

AND THEN THE REST OF THE VIDEO HAPPENED. Why aren't Post readers allowed to hear the rest of the story? This is like describing "How The Grinch Stole Christmas" as a story about a pitiless and irredeemable anti-Whovite monster.

But for some on the right, Sherrod's comments also reinforced a larger, more sinister narrative: that the administration of the first African American to occupy the White House practices its own brand of racism.

I love how this can be a "sinister" narrative but not a narrative that is entirely founded on bullshit -- from whence comes its "sinister" nature. I also love how this can be a "large" narrative, despite the fact that it only comprises "some on the right." And how "some on the right" are that "some on the right?" Pretty "some on the right," as it turns out!

Suspicions on the right that Obama has a hidden agenda -- theories stoked in part by conservative media and sometimes involving race -- have been a subplot of his rise, beginning almost as soon as he announced his campaign. They lie beneath many of the questions that conservatives on the political fringes have raised about his motives, his legitimacy and even his citizenship.
On the other hand, some of the president's allies on the left have at times reflexively seen racism as the real force behind the vehemence of the opposition against Obama's policies and decisions.

Let me pass the mic to Tom Scocca, over at Slate, to stare witheringly at this trainwreck:

Every issue has two sides. Some people believe that an Ivy-educated establishment striver who put Wall Street loyalists like Tim Geithner and Larry Summers in charge of the economy is really a Muslim Communist demagogue and a sleeper agent who used time-travel powers to forge his own birth announcement. Other people believe that those people's passion might be grounded in something other than the president's performance and policy agenda.

For God's sake. You stipulate that a "large sinister narrative" exists and go on to state that it's driven forward by people like birthers? As a reporter, how much Ativan do you have to take to miss the insanely obvious conclusion that maybe we ought not to be paying attention to this narrative?
But all of that is beside the point! This article started off with Shirley Sherrod as the subject, and determining "which side is at fault" as the task. Look how far off the map we've wandered! What are we even talking about anymore?
That's when we get to the second half of the article, which, if you are reading online, is on an entirely different page.

But in Sherrod's account, her firing was driven more by the exigencies of the news cycle -- and the administration's fear of conservative wrath. She said she was "harassed" to quit by USDA Deputy Undersecretary Cheryl Cook, who told her to "do it, because you're going to be on 'Glenn Beck' tonight."

This is what one calls "the literal truth." Why isn't this in the lede?

A video of the full speech -- which runs more than 45 minutes -- shows that Sherrod was trying to make a very different point from the one her critics saw in her inelegantly worded account of the episode with farmer Roger Spooner. An examination of her own prejudice, she said, taught her that "there is no difference between us."

Why isn't this in the first half of the story? Why did you leave readers hanging to find out this critical detail, until way after you raised the suspicion that the truncated video may have had some truth to it?

Ultimately, she did help the farmer -- and on Tuesday, his family was among those who came to her defense. "She's a good friend. She helped us save our farm," Spooner's wife, Eloise, told CNN. "She's the one I give credit for helping us save our farm."

Why isn't this in the first half of the story? Is it because there's too much invested in tying up this elaborate Gordian Knot of journalistic whimsy to risk the possibility that the Spooners might just slice right through it, with sensibleness?
The reason is because all the actual details of the story are far too conclusive! It takes away from the vagued-up, on-the-one-hand-now-on-the-other-hand, self-indulgent "narrative" that desires, at all costs, to pretend that the ultimate concern here is that there is "ongoing war between the left and right over which side is at fault for stoking persistent forces of racism in politics." (And remember, that important war is dominated by fools and cranks, like birthers!)
This story tells me nothing about what's going on in America. And it forces me to hang around, in suspense, before it deigns to tell me about what actually happened in this specific instance. It doesn't just steadfastly refuse to assign blame for Sherrod's ouster, it refuses to admit that blame can be assigned at all. Maybe it's my fault this happened. Maybe it's nobody's fault! Maybe we're all just bouncing without control or agency within the gauzy tesseract of the media narrative, spinning evermore in complete confusion. Or maybe the Washington Post just lives in mortal fear of cognition.
At the end of the piece, you learn, "Staff writer Ed O'Keefe contributed to this report." So there you have it: it took the expertise of three people to completely drain this story of expertise.

White House Apologizes To Shirley Sherrod

  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/21/gibbs-apologizes-to-shirl_n_654623.html

The Obama administration formally apologized on Wednesday to Shirley Sherrod, the USDA official abruptly fired earlier this week for comments taken out of context by conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart.
"On behalf of our administration, I offer an apology," White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said during Wednesday's daily briefing, acknowledging that the administration had not seen a full tape of Sherrod's comments prior to Tuesday evening. "Look, a disservice was done, an apology is owed. That's what we've done."
Gibbs relayed that Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack had been trying to speak to Sherrod on the phone. And later in the day, the Secretary held a press conference of his own during which he relayed that he had, indeed, talked to Sherrod, offered to hire her back, and apologized profusely for the episode.
"I did not think before I acted and for that this poor woman has gone through a very hard time," he said. "There will be changes, one thing there needs to be a more deliberative process, obviously, and I need to do a better job reaching out to get input before a decision of this magnitude is made."
"This is a good woman," he added. "She's been put through hell. She was put through hell and I could have done and should have done a better job."
Vilsack would go on to take complete responsibility for the firing saying that the buck stopped with him and not the president on this decision. But Gibbs cast a wider net, blaming the episode, in part, on the "frenzied culture" that exists in modern politics. "[W]e have a society and culture that's pervasive in this town where everything is viewed through the lens of who wins, who loses, how fast, by what margin," he said.
The Press Secretary also called the episode a "teachable moment," but declined to address who exactly was being taught or who was doing the teaching.
Certainly, the firing has provided a lesson in how quickly racial politics can captivate much of the conversation even during what has been described as a post-racial presidency. Earlier in the day, the president signed into law sweeping financial reform legislation, a major accomplishment that was given only mild attention during the daily briefing.
As the administration waxed apologetically for the firing, so too did Breitbart, who said he felt "bad that they made this about her."


Sherrod, not surprisingly, was not so quick to forget her treatment. She called Fox News' coverage of her out-of-context remarks (in which she appeared to talking about her past hesitancy in dealing with white farmers but was merely explaining how she overcame her race-based dispositions) unprofessional and even racist itself.
"They intended exactly what they did. They were looking for the result they got yesterday," she said, of the cable news station in an interview with Media Matters. "I am just a pawn. I was just here. They are after a bigger thing, they would love to take us back to where we were many years ago. Back to where black people were looking down, not looking white folks in the face, not being able to compete for a job out there and not be a whole person."
Sherrod, who was watching the Gibbs briefing on television, did not immediately say whether she would take her job back. Though it's fair to say that the White House would desperately welcome a peaceful ending to the saga. Gibbs stressed repeatedly that the administration had acted in haste. Sherrod said that a USDA official called her three times on Monday night demanding her resignation. Meanwhile, Politico's Ben Smith reported that top-ranking White House aides were initially pleased with how quickly they responded to the apparent crisis -- an account seconded to the Huffington Post by a Democratic source.
Gibbs insisted that the White House was not directly involved in the firing, an assertion that Vilsack confirmed. He vehemently denied that the administration had been too eager to quiet its conservative media critics. Indeed, he declined to criticize Breitbart by name. He did, however, offer subtle lectures to the reporters in attendance for (like the administration itself) not waiting to see the full context of Sherrod's remarks.
"Members of this administration, members of the media, members of different political factions on both sides of this have all made determinations and judgments without a full set of facts," he said. "Without a doubt, Ms. Sherrod is owed an apology."
Political opponents of Breitbart, meanwhile, are using the incident to drive home their argument that his hybrid form of activist-reporting work should no longer be trusted. The progressive watchdog group Media Matters for America released a video on Wednesday titled, "The End of Andrew Breitbart's Credibility."

THIS POST WAS UPDATED FROM ITS ORIGINAL VERSION WITH NEW REPORTING