"I am of course willing and will conduct a thorough review and consider additional facts to ensure to the American people we are providing services in a fair and equitable manner."
-Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack emerges from emergency spine-implantation surgery to announce that he will reconsider the firing of Shirley Sherrod. The NAACP has also reversed its early and hasty condemnation of Sherrod, who was the victim of a credulous media which operates at the beck and call of Andrew Breitbart's "moral ugliness."
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
14
Breitbart is an arsonist with a typewriter.
Don't trust any self-proclaimed journalistic mogul who hires Murdock from "The A-Team". Just don't.
Pro tip: Do not go reading threads on Breitbart's site. Ughghgh. They're still claiming that Sherrod was a racist, even on a post with the full video.
I couldn't be less confident that this will change anything. The media will always love a "roguish provocateur," there will always be a voracious audience for indulgences in white victimology, and this administration will continue to fail to stick up for its own people if it means rattling the Tea Party cage. The playbook has been written.
It's really troubling that, in an Administration that prides itself on deliberation and rational decision-making, such a reflex move got made.
So we'll wait for the explanations on that. But this one's got boneheadedness enough for everyone, it seems.
Not just any provocateur, though. If Michael Moore issued a press release about some explosive, dynamite footage he had acquired do you think anyone would run with it without independently verifying it or at least stamping a huge disclaimer on it?
And in the meantime, a guy like Tim Geithner can be responsible for monumental screwups that have a catastrophic effect on the world economy, and all he gets is promoted.
@conklin: My bad. I should have been more clear. You're absolutely right.
It's a question of media clout. Compare what happened with Acorn compared to what happened here. When Breitbart's site broke the Acorn bullshit, they did it very carefully, over about a week, releasing more and more footage that looked worse and worse. It took a few weeks for there to be any fallout on Acorn, and that's what established Breitbart as a reliably provocateur. I guarantee whoever fired Sherrod was trying to get under this to keep it from looking like Acorn.
@deep: But wasn't that Acorn video eventually revealed to be doctored and edited to the point of being false? Shouldn't the lesson have been "let's treat this guy with more skepticism" and not "let's get ahead of this scandal-to-be"?
Well, ideally, yeah. Unfortunately those revelations came out a few months later, and the doctoring wasn't egregious enough to be a major story.
Word of the day: VILSACK. n. An empty scrotum.
Breitbart was on GMA this morning trying to claim this was all about exposing racism in the NAACP, avoided any questions about Sherrod.
Hanging's too good for him.
TEAM SHIRLEY!