July 23, 2010
For the last couple of days, I've followed the news about Ms. Shirley Sherrod (at this writing, still a former employee of the Department of Agriculture, ) Andrew Breitbart's deliberate attempts to assassinate her character, the White House's botched response and the media outrage at what President Obama did and didn't do about the whole thing. Fox News (such as it is) had its own predictable part to play in this debacle, and no one is surprised at that. Or shouldn't be.
If you don't already know about all the brouhaha, start here and then Google for further information.
http://www.newsweek.com/spectrum/2010/07/21/the-shirley-sherrod-scandal.html
There are lots more links out there, views from both sides of the political chasm. What I found most interesting and equally annoying is that most of the moral outrage is directed at President Obama. We are hollering too much at the scammee, and not nearly enough at the scammer, I think.
Even the liberal media is denouncing Whitehouse response. Some of my favorite commentators are bemoaning the unavoidable truth that the Obama administration again fell for the usual baiting from far right media. Of course, I'm annoyed about that, too.
Tom Vilsack, Secretary of Agriculture, was the one who requested Ms. Sherrod's resignation without doing the basic fact checking. I assume that he was relying on information given him by others, the usual minions of government who are hired to keep the facts straight, and certainly there was a failure there. They should act decisively in keeping their own ethical house clean, but the fact-checking step should never be skipped.
Even considering all this screwing up, we are not putting nearly enough blame where it belongs.
I shudder at the idea of reading Andrew Breitbart's mind, but I can guess that he had very little against Ms. Sharrod personally. His target was the NAACP and, through it, the Obama administration. But according to a thoughtful article by Walter Shapiro at the Politics Daily website, it is not yet known who actually provided the heavily edited tape to Breitbart in the first place. How come this is not the big story? Where is all the journalistic indignation?
http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/07/22/the-shirley-sherrod-saga-lessons-from-bureaucratic-blunders/
Now that the press has schooled the Obama administration so thoroughly, they should be out beating the bushes for the real stinkers who started this snowball. I want to see the media blame placed on the political assassins who concocted the big lie in the first place, please. Keep the heat on Breitbart, and make him responsible for his inexcusable deceit.
