What happened to Shirley Sherrod yesterday is a disgrace: Tom Vilsack should be ashamed of himself for forcing her resignation and the Andy Alexanders of the world should be ashamed that they’ve spent the last year sucking up to Andrew Breitbart.
But I’m starting to think that the overall effect of this episode may be positive. Even nuts like Jonah Golberg think Breitbart owes Sherrod an apology. I don’t think that means much as far as Goldberg himself goes — Doughy Pantload will certainly be cheering the next heavily edited tape that Breitbart produces. But when even wingers (and Goldberg’s reaction seems fairly typical) are saying things like this, it’s hard to imagine that Kaplan, the Times, etc. will continue to ask why they aren’t covering Breitbart more.
Remember, the ACORN tapes were also heavily edited, but media that covered them — with the exception of the Daily Show — never offered any kind of retraction. And now, of course, ACORN is nearly defunct, partly as a result of coverage of these heavily edited tapes. I think the Sherrod kerfuffle will make it less likely that something like that happens again.
I believe that the the famed Dan Rather memos were forged by Republican operatives intent on squashing future coverage of how Bush got into the National Guard. It was an epic rat fuck and it worked brilliantly. Yesterday, the rats fucked themselves and, while the effect won’t be as great as with RATHERGATE, there will be an effect.
Breitbart obviously released the Sherrod tape as a response to the NAACP/Tea Party dust-up. It’s amazing how much heat the NAACP resolution caused.
Update. I see that David Frum already made the comparison with the National Guard memos earlier today.
Kryptik
You have more faith in the long-term memory of media whores than I do, Doug. That’s all I have to say about that.
Redshirt
Let’s all keep saying to ourselves (because it might be true): This is all the dying gasps of a disappearing order. Last tumult before they creep back into the dark night.
Mary
I really hope that Sherrod sues Breitbart and wins. Even if she’s not interested in suing for her own sake, there really have to be some consequences for this little turd’s actions.
jeffreyw
Wait a damn minute. “These rats ain’t gonna fuck themselves” is axiomatic. I smell a rat fucking here.
CaseyL
I didn’t realize Breitbart was also the driving force behind getting the ACORN tapes wide coverage. The man really is a waste of air and protoplasm – but also, unfortunately, a symptom rather than a cause.
kindness
I do think it would be wise for the Obama Administration to give the poor woman her job back & apologize profusely. Hell, I think it would be good for President Obama to announce it and say why. Sadly in this day, you do need to spell it all out or Phaux Pnews will run the board.
Scott
I think the Sherrod kerfuffle will make it less likely that something like that happens again.
To quote Mojo Nixon: You gonna eat them words.
Lolis
It can be a positive, if the Obama administration admits error, and offers Sherrod her position back. If she doesn’t want it back, I would understand that, but there should be some serious grovelling done by the president and other high-level people.
JGabriel
Does anyone else find this kind of gymnastic onanism visually disturbing?
.
roshan
Sherrod should accept reinstatement only if Mark Williams personally delivers the message.
MattF
I’m sure Breitbart will try to brazen this out, maybe he’ll come up with videos of that old white farmer’s granite countertops…
Xantar
@DougJ
“Remember, the ACORN tapes were also heavily edited, but media that covered them—with the exception of the Daily Show—never offered any kind of retraction.”
As depressing as it is to think that the Daily Show is the only news show with any journalistic integrity, I have to point out that Rachel Maddow has been very good about pointing out how shamelessly edited and misleading the ACORN tapes were.
Other than Jon Stewart and Rachel Maddow, though, the media landscape is very depressing indeed.
Bender
So I guess “heavily edited” is the talking point for the day?
Editing a tape doesn’t necessarily change the context of the tape. Breitbart should apologize to Sherrod for either editing her speech, or for not checking out the full version before posting, if it was given to him in edited form.
On the other hand, the ACORN tapes were damning in either form (though evidently not to the noted really-really-real hard-news show, “The Daily Show”!), edited or not. Oliver Stone couldn’t have saved those dumb bastards.
mistermix
I don’t know if it will have the lasting effect that you predict, but I think there’s going to be a pretty serious backlash *if* there’s a reinstatement.
If Vilsack is smart, he’d hit Breitbart a bit when he reinstates her. “Snookered” is the right angle.
The Grand Panjandrum
Anything bad that happens to Breitbart is well deserved comeuppance. He’s a fucking jackal.
DougJ
@Xantar:
But I’m guessing she also didn’t do any stupid coverage of them to begin with. I’m not trying to saying everyone bit on the bogus story, simply that of those who bit, only TDS retracted.
cleek
the rats almost fucked themselves, but the administration saved them by fucking itself.
Breitbart isn’t going anywhere. his fans won’t abandon him over this. Fox viewers won’t abandon them. Fox won’t stop showing Breitbart’s videos, though maybe they’ll all be a bit less brazen next time. but he’ll be back, because there will always be video of some liberal somewhere doing something stupid.
neill
hahahahhahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahaahhahhehehehehehehhehehhehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehhehahahahahahahahahahahahahahhaahahahhahahahahahahahahahoohoohoohoohoohoohoo
4tehlulz
Silly question because my Google-fu is weak today: Who’s financially backing Breitbart? Wiki didn’t really say, and the Googles they do nothing.
Elisabeth
As long as Fox “News” with Fox Lite (CNN) and Fox Lite During the Day (MSNBC) around we’ll see crap like this. Fox picks up some dubious story to promote their agenda then CNN and MSNBC follow behind trying to hide their librul bias. Then the print media follows up the rear trying to be relevant. It would be nice to think they’d learned a lesson but I doubt it.
What I do think may happen is that folks like those at the USDA, the NAACP, and the White House learn their lesson and don’t jump to conclusions. As Mike Viquiera (sp?) mentioned on MSNBC for a White House that has such contempt for cable news, and Fox in particular, they sure are quick to get rid of folks based on their “reporting.”
Frank
@kindness:
I agree and I’m sure they will do it today.
But why should she accept? Why would she want to work for a boss that thinks she is a racist and wouldn’t even bother to research the evidence. Hell, if anything, she should get her job back and Vilsack should be fired.
cleek
@Frank:
1000x this
Jim, Foolish Literalist
You’re more optimistic than I. Other than Frank Rich and Gene Robinson, I can’t think of a single Kaplan or Times columnist that will point out the absurdity of all this. If anyone on CNN makes a connection between ACORN and this on the Breitbart axis of stupid, I’ll eat my virtual hat.
matoko_chan
DougJ
This comment probably belongs up here.
Breitbart was just frothing with rage before he released the tape.
The reason, I think, is that the NAACP resolution provoked Williams into revealing himself as a stone racist, and proving indisputably that there is a strong racist component in the TPM. Its conspiracy theory– conservatives know they need youth and minority votes or they will go down to permanent defeat to the demographic timer.
And they know if the teapartiers are percieved as racists, they will never get those votes. So they tell themselves youth and minority voters are being kept from their wunnerful fiscal conservative ideals by unfair racist branding.
Its rebranding by magical thinking.
Daddy-O
“It’s amazing how much heat the NAACP resolution caused.”
It’s amazing, until you remember that if there’s one thing a racist hates, it’s being called out.
Denial and peer pressure, even from one’s opponents, are the two most powerful expressions of the human brain’s influence over behavior.
Agoraphobic Kleptomaniac
@Bender:
You win the dumb sentence award this morning. Congrats.
Also, given how poorly cut and misconstrued the new video is, and that we still haven’t got the full Acorn tapes, You really need to reevaluate you conclusions. From the snippets, there are allusions to OKeefe being a boyfriend/law student/savior of orphans, not a pimp. I wouldn’t be surprised if he just happened to cut this information (which *gasp* changes the context).
Aside: I’m amazed that the media can go to Briebart’s site and take anything seriously. I went over there yesterday to see what he said with the post, and the whole site is a joke. I mean, when 6 posts earlier, you have a guy complaining how OJ Simpson made it so he can’t use the “N” word anymore, I don’t know how anyone can look at that site as anything but insane.
El Cid
I’m not convinced, but this is certainly an optimistic view. It’s certainly physically possible.
Given the rather minor and pathetic ‘apologies’ for even Judith Miller’s flat out propaganda falsehoods in the New York Times on one of the biggest policy issues of our nation’s history (just using the NYT as a general example rather than suggesting it as a particular focus on the Sherrod fake story), I’m quite doubtful
But hopefully that’s just me.
ed
By the way, this one’s on Team Obama. Precedent for this shameful episode was cast over two years ago when they shitcanned the awesome and extremely qualified Samantha Power for over a non-issue that the Hillary campaign successfully trumped up into a major pearl-clutching Event. And that begat the shameful Van Jones Affair which begat the very unfortunate ACORN Affair.
There’s a lot to make up for, but telling Vilsack he has to fall on his sword and offering the, by all decent accounts, decent Ms. Sherrod a state (not an important one. Wyoming, for example) would go some distance to make up for the past horseshit. It would be a start anyway.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Maybe Breitbart has, in fact, become too publicly insane even for CNN and Kaplan
Breitbart’s New Conspiracy Theory: The ‘Purported’ Farmer’s Wife Is A Plant
DougJ
@ed:
Could be. I don’t know what happened between Vilsack and the White House.
Chris G.
One hopes Sherrod will sue the bejeezus out of Breitbart.
Chad N Freude
@Bender:
Edited to prove Bender’s point:
ETA: Canonical FYWP block-quote fail.
cmorenc
This from Fox’s latest story on the Sherrod matter over at their website:
That’s rich: “It remains unclear who edited and released the shorter video”…which was obtained from “an individual in Georgia”. But even if Breitbart technically wasn’t the one editing the video, he [and Fox News] were ready, willing, and eager to immediately broadcast it, without any checking whatever to see whether it was misleadingly edited. And that’s the best possible face they can put on this matter.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@DougJ: While it’s pretty clear (and shocking and disappointing) that Vilsack had a direct role in this, I have a hard time imagining Vilsack picked up the emergency bat phone to the Oval Office, at which point Obama dropped everything he was doing to discuss a pretty low-level Ag Dept bureaucrat who was being featured in a video on Breitbart’s website. Reading the hysterical commentary on some of my once favorite blogs (OBAMA HAS CEDED CONTROL OF THE GOVERNMENT TO GLEN BECK!) reminds of why this is almost the only blog I stll read regularly. I’ve even seen some of the old “We are all Van Jones now” crap being dredged back up.
kid bitzer
“the famed Dan Rather memos were forged by Republican operatives intent on squashing future coverage of how Bush got into the National Guard”
yeah, that’s how it struck me at the time. it was clever, and it had rove’s finger-prints all over it.
but the real power behind the puke funnel doesn’t lie in the kick-off phase where a rove or a breitbart starts this stuff. they are the obvious hard-core partisan point of the spear.
the real power lies in the ability of the moderate, mainstream establishment wise men to repeat the name “rather” and “rathergate” until he becomes ostracized, but then never, ever ostracize someone from the right wing.
their will be no “breitbartgate”. breitbart will not be forced to resign. he will not lose his credibility.
this is the real power of the puke-funnel in all of its wide-reaching manifestations: that people on the right can never lose their credibility. and anyone who crosses the right immediately has none.
it’s like josh marshall says: the village is just wired for republican control.
i hope we can chip away at it, but it’s damned hard work.
Bender
@Agoraphobic Kleptomaniac:
Sure. If you say so.
So every news broadcast in the history of television that wasn’t an unedited airing of an entire event or speech is now tainted by “heavy editing?” Wow! You have got yourself a high standard there, and evidently, a lot of free time to watch stuff! Better get every media outlet on the planet on the phone and inform them of the new rules!
Oh, no. Those rules are only for when attacking Democrats. I should’ve known.
You win the Off Your Fucking Nut Award this morning. Congrats!
kindness
@matoko_chan:
“and proving indisputably that there is a strong racist component in the TPM.”
racists at Talking Points Memo? Man, who can you trust any more?
Zifnab
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Maybe CNN committed a little thing called “journalism” and actually researched this shit out.
But, let’s be fair. Who are you going to believe? America’s Most Trusted Name In News, or Mr. Edited Tapes Make The NAACP Racist? It’s me versus your lying eyes.
Svensker
@matoko_chan:
Breitbart’s grammar fu ain’t so hot either.
The Moar You Know
@4tehlulz: Drudge backed him fully and got him into business. I do not know if there is an ongoing flow of monies from Drudge to Andrew, but it is likely.
The bigger question; who funds Drudge?
scav
Speaking of fucking rats, a brief pause to consider this stellar example:
gelfling545
I suspect that after the review of this matter Vilsack, Cook et al will be “exploring other opportunities” of “spending more time with their families” or whatever the current euphemism is. Perhaps not immediately, but soon.
Zifnab
@Bender:
I know you are but what am I? Rubber, that’s what! And you’re glue! HaHA!
Perhaps it’s time for you to start your own blog, Bender. I bet it’ll be way better than this one. Cause it’ll have blackjack. And hookers.
Tokyokie
A couple of difference between this and the ACORN “scandal”:
First, in this case, there were sources outside the Breibart orbit who knew the real story, i.e., everybody in attendance at the NAACP event. With the ACORN story, he and his ilk made the tapes, then edited the hell out of them.
Second, in this case, Breibart took down an individual who was demonstrably not as he attempted to portray her. And I think it’s a lot easier for people to sympathize with another person who has been clearly wronged than it is to get worked up about the fate of an organization that they’ve only heard about it.
Sadly, I think that will be the lesson Breibart learns from this: Choose the smear target more carefully.
Rhoda
@ed: This is bs IMO.
The politics of the Powers situation were simple: to can her killed the story. To keep her made it an open sore that Clinton could press to suppress the female vote for Obama and tell a story that wasn’t true; had a plot the media would be more than willing to run.
Van Jones DID flirt with 9/11 trutherism; that’s his mistake. A political activist can make that mistake while a politico can’t and that’s why he got shitcanned.
Sherrod’s tape made it seem clear she had racist attitudes; it was edited and a lie but the tape told a story that had the administration not reacted EVEN with the facts coming out it would have created a problem too.
This was fucked up from go; racial politics for this administration are a reality and an open nerve that Republicans have been punching from jump. Most of the time the MSM doesn’t catch it. If the administration admits the mistake; reinstates her I’ll be satisfied. But given ACORN, given how the media chose to play the Van Jones story, given the privilege critics get in regard to the administration I’m not going to say Villsack made a mistake.
He tried to protect the President. He believed a lie that hurt a good woman. He needs to get right on that; but he reacted the way I would have too and I don’t think he should be faulted or the administration should be faulted for believing the original edited tape.
Video is powerful. It’s scary to think what would have happened had the whole tape or those farmers hadn’t come out and spoken up.
Elisabeth
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
I agree except that there seems to be a culture within the administration to eliminate the threat of ongoing negative media coverage as soon as possible before gathering the facts. If Vilsack or Gibbs was asked about the video they could quite easily have said they are investigating the matter and will take the appropriate action in the near future. Instead it seems very apparent they acted first and asked questions later. On the basis of a video posted by Breithbart and promoted by FNC. Even I know that’s a remarkably stupid thing to do.
someguy
Bender’s a racist troll. Don’t feed the trolls.
Bender
@Chad N Freude:
I guess you guys don’t know what the word “necessarily” means.
FAIL.
Bender
@someguy:
Spencer Ackermann comments on this blog? Ick.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Yowza. Dickie Cohen, of all people, has a column on “Vilsack’s cowardice”. I’m almost tempted to read it, to see if he calls out his paper’s ombuds-nitwit, who only days before this incident gave Breitbart a huge credibility boost.
JGabriel
@cmorenc:
Well, they never expected white people to step forward and defend Sherrod.
White people! Liberals are turning even Good Georgian Farmers into self-hating Caucasians! Breitbart and Fox never imagined it had gotten that far.
.
wasabi gasp
To avoid unfairly targeting other nice Shirlies, the next time Breitbart wants to expose racism he should make a longer list of black people to choose from.
slag
As someone who still has Van Jones on their Google News alerts, I can say without a doubt that firing these people only acts as confirmation to every individual who writes a letter to every podunk newspaper that the entire Obama Administration is filled with racist-Maoist-communist-fascist-black liberation-atheist appeasers. Of course, all these individual letter writers are probably really Republican operatives pretending to be moronic illiterate CapsLock-loving lunatics, but still…It gets the job done.
To be fair, though, the moronic illiterate CapsLock-loving lunatics seem to have the appeaser thing right.
Chad N Freude
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Breitbart has no obligation to verify the accuracy what he publishes, but an organization that publishes a refutation of the story has an obligation to prove the identity of the witness. Got it.
somethingblue
I think this is going to be all kinds of win for the right, and we’ve only seen Act I.
Act II will come in January when the Republican-controlled Congress opens hearings on the Obama administration’s illegitimate, racially-motivated dismissal of an upstanding African-American public servant and patriot.
Chad N Freude
@Bender: I guess you don’t know what the word “editing” means.
arguingwithsignposts
Just curious what kind of traffic Breitbart gets for his various projects? Is biggovernment really that big a deal?
roshan
Only watch trailers, movies just stretch the context, as someone above mentioned.
Chad N Freude
@someguy: I don’t know that he’s racist. I do know that he’s a staunch defender of the Constitutional right to distort the news.
JGabriel
@slag:
“Pretending”?
.
Hypnos
@Bender:
Editing so at to convey the exact opposite meaning of what the original material = bad (it’s also known as “lying”)
Editing to make the original material shorted while maintaining the same meaning = good (also known as “telling the truth”).
Let’s make an example.
Person A says:
“I think racism is wrong. I think we should all try and be better persons by overcoming our prejudices and saying no to racism. That would be a good thing.”
Person B edits the above so it says:
“I think racism is […] a good thing.”
That would be wrong.
Person C edits the above so it says:
“I think racism is wrong. […] saying no to racism […] would be a good thing.”
That would be proper behaviour.
curious
i imagine breitbart has a file cabinet of thinly-sourced potential BLOCKBUSTERS, indexed by name/constituency/organization, for release whenever said person/constituency/organization politically wounds fellow ideologues.
the daily caller likely has a similar database of highly-edited incriminating emails from journolist, except they release them about every 2 weeks or so because why else would anyone visit that site?
Mnemosyne
I have a feeling that Bender watched this and really thought “The Shining” is a romantic comedy. You know, because editing never lies.
Kryptik
@Rhoda:
But there’s still no excuse for how fast this happened, especially since the real facts came out literally hours after the shitcanning. Even the Van Jones railroading took at least a couple months.
slag
@JGabriel: You’re right. I was trying to draw the fool-knave distinction, but at this point, there probably is no such distinction anymore. And even if there were a distinction, it seems to be a distinction without a difference since the effect of each is essentially the same.
Chad N Freude
@Hypnos: @Mnemosyne: Just in case you missed this (I’m rather proud of it): @Chad N Freude.
Steeplejack
@Chad N Freude:
Just put two underscore characters on each blank line between the paragraphs of your blockquote, and that will keep them together.
Should end up looking like this:
(h/t Monkeyboy © 2009)
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
While I agree with this analysis, it doesn’t earn Obama any points as far as I’m concerned. Maybe Vilsack is just an idiot, but I have to wonder if political cowardice starts at the top and works down the chain from there, so that cabinet secretaries, under-secretaries, etc. all know the boss won’t have their back if they fuck up.
This smells way too much of Eisenhower playing golf while Joe McCarthy was burning down DC for my comfort. Breitbart is a political terrorist. You can’t appease people like that. As Winston Churchill said pace Munich, they have chosen shame over war, and now they are going to get both.
Chad N Freude
@Steeplejack: Thanks. I know this, but I was so eager to put my witty takedown on display that I didn’t think about it.
Agoraphobic Kleptomaniac
@Bender: lol.
Chad N Freude
@Steeplejack:
Very funny.
Chad N Freude
@Bender: This is really absurd. Editing should be done in such a way that the facts and meaning of the edited story are not altered or distorted. Difficult concept, isn’t it?.
Davis X. Machina
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: The whole affair was timed not with the earlier NAACP flap in mind, but with Cameron’s visit in mind. The video was after all already in existence, and probably pre-cut.
Under those circumstances whatever phone rang in the WH — if any rang at all, I’m convinced the loop stayed entirely in Ag — it was answered by an intern.
Decapitation strike by other means. With the embarrassment happening when you’ve got company in the house, and the English-speaking foreign press all over the yard.
Steeplejack
@Chad N Freude:
WP is like having a manic-depressive mom. You never know when you get home from school if it’s going to be cookies and milk or tiptoe over the vodka bottles because she’s “resting.”
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Davis X. Machina:
But if we had a Truman in the WH, then nobody at Ag (or any other dept) would need to get through on the phone to the WH in order to do the right thing. They would already know that not caving in immediately in the face of a flash mob of hate (love that tag BTW) was the best, the right, and the only decision to make, without having to ask “mother may I?”.
But we don’t have a Truman in the WH. We have an Eisenhower. And so it does matter whether the phone call gets thru or not, and who answers it. And that’s a problem. A big problem.
ETA: in this age of flash mob media, firings are like gun purchases. There should be a 5 day waiting period.
danimal
I came to the same conclusion, DougJ.
The media (not just Fox) was burned by this story and the administration (Vilsack, at least) was incinerated. The whole Wurlitzer/Wurlitzer response cycle was exposed in an embarrassing way for all involved. The big-time media editors and the administration executives will change procedures and become more risk-averse in similar situation as a response to this debacle. Not because they value journalistic integrity or exposing all the facts before making a decision; they’ll change because they’ll be plainly exposed as fools if Breitbart or his disciples successfully pull off another stunt on them.
Davis X. Machina
Which violates every principle of media crisis management.
Welcome to the age of the permanent campaign.
It’s too late to burn all the copies of The War Room.
Mnemosyne
@Kryptik:
The real facts came out because she was fired, not in spite of it. If she hadn’t been at least suspended, we would still be dealing with the “Obama hired a racist!” bullshit for at least another week until the noise machine had worked itself into a full howl. Firing her sped up the life cycle of the scandal in a major way.
We can argue about whether a suspension would have had the same effect on the scandal (I think it would have) but swift action really does seem to have helped here. Had you even heard of Shirley Sherrod 48 hours ago?
valdivia
@Steeplejack:
FTMF. Someone should tweet that.
celticdragonchick
I just read the Frum piece from the link above.
I know that many folks in here can’t stand Frum, but take the time and read his essay.
Really.
One of the best and most damning analysis of this sorry affair I have seem yet.
John Bird
I have no clue what to make of Frum deserting the sinking ship, but this much of what he states is true:
The only blame I can assign to the government here, really, is that everyone should know by now that the right-wing media is a group of showmen without any system for accountability. If the folks who caved had bothered to withhold judgement of their own political ally for all of 24 hours, they would have gotten a huge victory from this one rather than a moderate one – the victory of turning their accusers into living jokes, which is one of the biggest victories you can have in the media cycle.
Rhoda
@Kryptik: Video. If something’s on video it’s going to HAVE to happen fast. That’s just the way it is in this media enviroment IMO.
I don’t think the administration did ANYTHING wrong and I think liberals and the blogosphere focusing on Vilsack are making a tactical mistake that allows Breitbart to walk away and FOX to not take a hit.
At the very least; there should have been calls out saying FOX shouldn’t get Thomas’s seat after this.
Stillwater
But I’m starting to think that the overall effect of this episode may be positive.
That’s because you hold the view that establishment media’s function is to serve facts on platters to a news-hungry electorate. I disagree with this characterization of what the media’s practical – as well as theoretical – function is. In my view, the media’s primary purpose is to feed the body politic a steady diet of propaganda intended to induce stupor, anger or fear depending on the specifics of the policy/prerogative being advanced. With respect to terrorism, we are served massive quantities of fear. With respect to torture, we get platitudes and word-salad designed to induce stupor. Breitbart is not unusual in force-feeding propaganda on the masses – he just transgresses the fuzzy boundaries of respectability in applying his methods. Believing that his ‘getting caught’ will somehow limit the amount of disinformation/dog-whistling spewed by other outlets and reporters is optimistic to the point of naivete.
Kryptik
@Mnemosyne:
I don’t buy that explanation. I don’t. What would keep the facts from coming out as quickly as they did if Vilsack, the USDA, the White House, etc. didn’t pull the trigger as fast as they did? How, exactly, did it speed up the life of the ‘scandal’, considering that the full on video was released in a matter of…what, a day at most? You might still have Fox and Breitbart harping on it, but I just don’t see how that would damage Obama and the administration any more than this already has.
And no, I wasn’t terribly aware of Sherrod 48 hours ago. And honestly, that sounds like all the more reason why it feels like Vilsack and Obama did more than just outright jump the gun.
David Brooks
Now the rats have a two-fer. The narrative has already changed:
1. We agree Sherrod is a good person. The White House (who’s ever heard of Vilsack?) is evil for firing her.
2. This was never about her anyway. It was about the NAACP members’ positive reactions to her racism. It was always about that. The NAACP is evil for cheering her admitted racism.
With the way Fox works, they will have no trouble shifting the narrative and running both tracks.
Mnemosyne
@Kryptik:
For one thing, Mrs. Sherrod would not have been free to go on TV to defend herself if she was still an active employee of the USDA. It would have been a news blackout and “no comment” and the media would have gone into a frenzy about what the administration was “hiding.” Not to mention the NAACP’s part — if she was still under a cloud with them as well, how do you think it would look to have Shirley Sherrod vs. an NAACP spokesperson going head-to-head on Wolf Blitzer’s show?
There wouldn’t have been the incentive to find the whole video, and there certainly wouldn’t have been the incentive on the part of the media to run the whole video. It would have been presented as Sherrod’s word against Breitbart’s. You know, like with the ACORN tapes.
Really? The right wing is carefully building a case to “prove” that Obama favors black people over white people and brings out a video showing a woman who works for the administration at a NAACP event saying that she didn’t help a white farmer and you think that letting the edited video be shown over and over again for a week would be less damaging to the administration than slapping the story down within 24 hours?
I have no idea what “did more than just outright jump the gun” means. What are you envisioning?
Davis X. Machina
I don’t think the NAACP flap with Williams earlier makes much difference — that may have influenced the speed of the NAACP’s own response, but not the timing of Breitbart’s hit.
It’s about winning the week. We’re not talking about Cameron’s visit, Kagan’s passage out of committee, or the signing ceremony today for the FinReg bill, are we?
Slowbama
After watching the unedited version, it’s clear that Sherrod’s real sin was telling the truth about the fact that economic inequality is at the root of most issues facing us today. This is the truth that cannot be spoken of, ever, and that was the real line she crossed.
matoko_chan
@David Brooks: it was ALWAYS about Breitbart going after the NAACP.
he said that 2 days before he released the tape.
that is why he dint give a rats ass if Sherrod lost her job or was really anti-racism.
it is called catalepsis, to be seized.
lawyers use it all the time, to introduce outrageous lines of inquiry that they know will be overruled.
learning is sticky in homo sap. it can take 10k reps to unlearn something we learn in a single rep.
Corner Stone
@Mnemosyne:
They helped Sherrod clear her name by firing her without giving her 20 minutes to give her side?
Are you insane?
ETA – now that I read it again, it’s obvious you meant that “Obama” was helped by her being fired quickly.
Gotcha.
matoko_chan
And Breitbart is lying when he says he just got the piece of pre-editted tape.
he edited the whole thing down himself.
he says right there….. “I have tapes”…and then corrects it.
Mike in NC
What are the odds that before Labor Day FOX will reward Breitbart with his very own prime time slot, probably sandwiched between Hannity and O’Reilly?
Nick
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: Truman didn’t have a flash mob of hate to deal with
Doctor Science
@arguingwithsignposts:
Traffic comparison (data from Alexa.com):
http://goodbookoftheday.com/pix/traffic.jpg
Basically, biggovernment normally gets as much traffic as redstate, but has occasional *huge* spikes.
Drudge gets about as much traffic as Balloon Juice.
cyntax
@Mike in NC:
Sure it won’t be CNN?
terry chay
I actually cancelled my Wired subscription a while back because they did a huge puff piece on Breitbart. It was obvious even then that he was a journalistic McCarthy, and what is happening to him (and will happen) is inevitable.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Davis X. Machina:
Yeah, I know I’m going very much against conventional wisdom here. I think the CW is wrong – the permanent campaign has degenerated to the point where it is no longer an effective or valuable response to our current media environment. It is making things worse rather than better.
An analogy would be the way the US Forest Service got too good at putting out fires quickly, before they realized that wildfire is a normal and desirable part of forest ecology. This media incident is the Mann Gulch Fire of War Room style media management. The smokejumpers got burnt, and we need to figure out a better way to do this, like knowing when to back off.
Rick Taylor
__
I hope you’re right. I’m still reeling from the knowledge this happened after Breitbart had been completely discredited after successfully destroying Acorn; if that wasn’t enough what will be? But I hope you’re right.
DickSpudCouchPotatoDetective
@Bender:
Thanks to Rachel Maddow, we know that at least one episode of “damning” Acorn tapes turned out to be false and misleading as presented in the news stories. The Acorn official in the video turned out to be gathering information from the ratfuckers so that he could call his relative in the nearby police department and report what the ratfuckers were supposedly up to.
Without knowing this, the ratfuck interview appears to show the Acorn guy going along with some bad behavior. After knowing this, the Acorn guy just looks like a good citizen out to turn in some criminals.
IIRC. It’s been a week or two since I saw the Maddow report.
comrade scott's agenda of rage
@Scott:
To quote Mojo Nixon: Elvis is everywhere. Each and every one of us has a little bit of Elvis inside of us. Except Breitbart, he has *no* Elvis in him.
Death Panel Truck
@JGabriel:
Only if you disregard the metaphorical intent of the phrase and take the time to actually think about it and, you know, take it literally. Why would you do that, anyway?
Death Panel Truck
He’s the anti-Elvis.
Mnemosyne
@Rick Taylor:
It was enough for us, but unfortunately there was enough time between the tapes and the debunking that the MSM that it didn’t really register with them. Even “The Daily Show” got caught by Breitbart and had to apologize.
This has been an epically fast meltdown, so fast that the media can’t ignore it. I do think Breitbart is going to have to lay low for a while after this.
Tom Q
I’m with DougJ on seeing positives here. I know an awful lot of people are locked into the “woe-is-us, the righties are out-maneuvering the crap out of us”, and certainly I think much hinges on the administration at least offering Sherrod’s job back, to make it clear how great an injustice this all was.
But, Christ, people, don’t you see the difference between this and the usual coverage? Typically this story would have ended with “well, the videotape says one thing, but Breitbart says otherwise, so who knows what’s true?” Instead, CNN and MSNBC are screaming ‘Breitbart’s a frickin’ liar”. That’s progress, dammit.
Mike B
Greg Sargent has been excellent on this — and continues to be. See here and here.
I’m also glad that Shirley Sherrod is calling it like it is.
People really need to hold the Obama administration’s feet to the fire on this. The propensity of this administration to throw people under the bus every time the racist media lynch mob demand a scalp is sickening. I’m fed up with it. Obama has an opportunity, here, to make this a “teachable moment”. If he does not do so, I’ll never forgive him.
What does it take to get this guy to stand up to this crap and push back for a change? What does it take?
Bender
Yeah, that ACORN guy did report them to his relative who was a cop, but that only came out after Giles and O’Keefe had released the tape. I don’t think G&O would’ve had a way of knowing he was stinging them. To them, he appeared helpful.
Even Maddow said that the unedited tapes only exonerate, in her eyes, two of the many ACORN employees in question, the man in California and a woman in NJ, IIRC. Even Maddow admitted that ACORN was rife with corruption and the others probably deserved what they got.
Of course, she smarmily led off with her opinion that Giles and O’Keefe did nothing right and were worthy only of scorn, not a Congressional citation. Then she admits at the end that they caught a lot of corrupt ACORN employees. But that’s her M.O. — bombastic declarations followed by weak evidence…
Mnemosyne
@Bender:
Which unedited tapes are those, Bender? To my knowledge, Breitbart and O’Keefe have never actually made completely unedited tapes available. The “unedited” ones they provided had dubbed-over vocals so you don’t know what the person shown on the tape actually said.