Did some channel surfing to see if there was anything new on this stuff and noticed Breitbart on GMA so I’m going to switch over briefly for this.
Checking Morning Joe while they do an airline story first, Pat brings up the “no backup” from the White House business. If the story is all about the Whitehouse and the NAACP rushing to throw people out of the bus then Breitbart has won this big time.
The irony of course was they were afraid of Beck and Beck backed her up.
Joe Scarborough: “If they are afraid of the guy with the chalkboard they can we get someone else to deal with Iran because we’re screwed”
Apparently the government is suddenly backing off too
Ok back to GMA
Shirley Sherrod on GMA, She says she still backs this administration but is “dissented”, they owe her BIG for that line
She hasn’t decided if she will accept her job back. Bazinga!
Breitbart on GMA at 7:30
7:20 a.m. Back to Morning Joe Talking to Savannah the story is all about the weak and scared White House. Look at them squirm!
7:35 a.m. GMA give example of racism left and right. New Black panther on left and for right? Macaca and Washington, give me a break!
7:36 a.m. Breitbart is using this appearance with Eric Boehlert to play the double standard card and quite effectively.
7:38 a.m. Who wants to bet that this is the first time a lot of GMA people heard about the 100k offer., Boehlert says he will take Lewis over 4 videos.
7:39 a.m. Breitbart notes the audience reaction in the video when she talked about deciding how much help was to be given. Compares this to the NAACP standard on the tea party.
7:40 a.m. Breitbart has cleaned their clocks. Boehlert says it’s ok to show Breitbart’s video on the “Washington Incident”.
7:42 a.m. He cleaned their clock. Boehlert looked like a duck hit over the head. GMA now is in a position where they need to show the Breitbart videos and if they don’t he can right them on it. Bazinga!
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said Wednesday that he will reconsider the abrupt firing of Shirley Sherrod, a Georgia-based Agriculture Department official who was the victim of a media frenzy over comments that turned out to have been distorted by video editing.
“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,” Vilsack said in a statement e-mailed by USDA at 2:07 a.m.
A former Department of Agriculture official said her termination was an unfair casualty of a larger political spat on race between the Tea Party movement and the NAACP, but Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack Tuesday afternoon stood by his decision to seek her termination based on a controversial anecdote she told earlier this year.
Her story sounds plausible particularly since the farmer in question seems to be backing her up. The fact that her resignation came so quickly counted against her but Big Government suggest that they couldn’t wait to throw her under the bus:
Sherrod told CNN that she was forced to resign because ”you’re going to be on Glenn Beck tonight.” While she was driving home from work last night Sherrod told CNN that Cheryl Cook, the deputy undersecretary for Rural Development, called her three times on “harassing” her with warnings about the attention she was going to receive after the video surfaced. On the final call Cook demand that she pull over to the side of the road and resign electronically then and there.
That’s pretty cold, Dunetz continues:
If this story is true, and there is no reason to doubt her, it shows the extent that Breitbart, Fox,and the Tea Party have gotten under the skin of the White House. Rather then to think it through they overreacted and forced Sherrod to pull over on the side of the road and resign without telling her side of the story.
It is also hard to understand why the NAACP would instantly condemn Ms Sherrod, if the speech was indeed as she said, why wouldn’t they respond by releasing the entire speech? One explanation may be that she is lying, but if you listen closely to the end of the clip she does seem to be pivoting toward saying it was about income not race (and then seems to change her mind again).
Another explanation for the White House and the NAACP not releasing the entire tape is the possibility that Shirley Sherrod is their sacrificial lamb. Possibly they do not care about the truth. Perhaps they realized their resolution attacking the Tea Party as racist was such a political loser, especially coming right after disclosure of DOJ Black Panther scandal, they see the condemnation of Sherrod as a way out of theses crises and seem racially balanced.
In my post yesterday, I was pretty clear that the Breitbart tape wasn’t sitting well with me. Ms. Sherrod–still not a great speaker–clearly was on her way to relate a tale that indicted her own understanding, when that tape ended.
You know what’s not singing to me, now? The argument that “the tape wasn’t about nailing Sherrod, it was about demonstrating the racism of the NAACP audience; it was a response to their wicked attempt to paint the Tea Party as racist.”
As I said yesterday, there was certainly a stones/glass houses note to it all, but Shirley Sherrod had a story to tell, and as far as I’m concerned, that story needed telling in full – that was the only way to be fair to Sherrod. After it was told, then, if you wanted to make the point about the audience’s reaction to her own tale–which is apparently one that indicts her own racist past–you could do that. Otherwise, all you’ve done is destroyed Sherrod in the same way that Trent Lott was ruined: by taking her remarks out of context.
Context matters. If the right, quite correctly, doesn’t like to see pols on their side tarnished with this despicable label sans context, they they can’t be happy to see what happened to Sherrod.
And then she asked the NAACP question:
NAACP says it was snookered by Breitbart and Fox. They said they have “reviewed the tape.” Well, good. Why didn’t they do that, first thing? And when can we see it?
Yeah they were kinda fast assuming they had the tape, could there be more there there? Particularly since the government stands behind their dumping of her. The Washington Examiner may have that answer:
Here are just a few questions about Ms. Sherrod that deserve answers:
* Was Ms. Sherrod’s USDA appointment an unspoken condition of her organization’s settlement?
* How much “debt forgiveness” is involved in USDA’s settlement with New Communities?
* Why were the Sherrods so deserving of a combined $300,000 in “pain and suffering” payments — amounts that far exceed the average payout thus far to everyone else? ($1.15 billion divided by 16,000 is about $72,000)?
* Given that New Communities wound down its operations so long ago (it appears that this occurred sometime during the late 1980s), what is really being done with that $13 million in settlement money?
Is the source for the full tape the same as Breitbart’s source for the partial tape?
Did the NAACP provide the full tape, they said they “reviewed the tape” that implies they provided it to CNN? If so why make the initial statement and why claim to be fooled by their own tape?
What else does Breitbart have?
How is this going to end? I have absolutely no idea, but it won’t be boring.
Update: Full tape up on NAACP site, they apparently had the whole thing all along. Am I the only person who finds it odd that NAACP jumped on this before, if they had this tape in their possession? I’m wondering if somebody played Breitbart?
CNN is going after the NAACP’s Shelton: Campbell Brown “You allowed yourselves to be snookered”
Look at the crowd reaction when she says this. Is there shock? Is there disgust? Is there anger? Nope, they are with her all the way.
That says more about the NAACP than anything Sherrod did. The NAACP didn’t reject Shirley Sherrod that night or last week because they never had a problem with what she said.
If Andrew Brietbart didn’t put out that video they would still be behind her. The only reason why Ben Jealous et/al have rejected Sherrod is because what she said to them behind closed doors in the past has been exposed to the general public. It is the same as Barack Obama and Rev Wright, if those videos of Wright didn’t exist he would be a regular guest at the White House today.
It would be very interesting to find people in that crowd and ask them if they had a problem with what she said when she said it.
Update 5:+ 5 1/2 Full tape out included in the Update 4 link. Well that explains the lack of reaction of the crowd doesn’t it… at least except for the laughter when they think she isn’t going to help him.
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