Tracking Teh Crazie - WND On That Breitbart-Obama Video

Read teh crazie here:

Video footage of President Obama during his college years at Harvard University was intentionally suppressed by news media and academia during the 2008 presidential campaign in order to hide Obama’s connections with radical leftists, according to the editors of Breitbart.com, the website of late conservative activist Andrew Breitbart.

Tapes of Obama at Harvard in 1991 have now been posted online and aired on the Fox News Channel, and they show then–student Obama speaking warmly on behalf of a leftist professor, Derrick Bell.

“Open up your hearts and your minds to the words of Professor Derrick Bell,” Obama says during his speech before hugging him.

The embrace between the pair had been edited out of a video that was released earlier in the day by Buzzfeed. (Video of the embrace can be seen here.)

“This is just the beginning. And this video is a smoking gun showing that Barack Obama not only associated with radicals, he was their advocate,” said Breitbart editor Ben Shapiro.

Referring to Professor Bell, Shapiro explained, “This is a close associate of [controversial Obama Rev.] Jeremiah Wright, a man who was quoted by Jeremiah Wright regularly. This is a man who posited that the civil rights movement was too moderate because it accepted the status quo, and believed that the entire legal and constitutional system had to be transformed in radical fashion. This is a man so extreme that, as we’ve reported, he wrote a story in 1993 in which he posited that white Americans would sell black Americans into slavery to aliens to relieve the national debt, and that Jews would go along with it.”

Selling black Americans to aliens to relieve the national debt?? What the heck is that all about?  Once you see the details and how WND/Breitbart is manipulating them, you'll see how empty this story is.

Even On Election Day, My Work Is Never Done.

From the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review Braintrust:

The folks at Seattle's KTVA-TV insist the incident was not as nefarious as some made it out to be. But it certainly wasn't very complimentary and it might very well be representative of the unfair treatment Republicans can expect if they surge to victory in today's elections.

Here's what happened: A telephone call to discuss Alaska GOP U.S. Senate candidate Joe Miller's upcoming appearance on a newscast never disconnected when it was "over." Station staffers then can, among other things, be heard laughing at the possibility of reporting on the appearance of sex offenders at a Miller rally.

The Miller campaign claims the station was plotting to fabricate stories. The station denies that interpretation as "out of context." Nevertheless, it was enough to prompt former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to label those involved at the CBS affiliate as "corrupt bastards."

See, this is how the great smear works. The braintrust is counting on you not checking the story, not checking the facts (or "facts") for yourselves. They're hoping you'll trust them that they're telling the whole truth.

Of course they're not.

The story popped up at Andrew Breitbart's website first. That should be the first clue that something's amiss. Breitbart, let's all take a minute to remember, lied about Shirley Sherrod. He championed another liar, James O'Keefe. In a rational journalistic world, that would completely undermine any claim of credibility Breitbart has, has ever had or ever will have.

And this is where this "corrupt bastard" story began.

But let's leap like a frog over that part and look at some examples of skepticism regarding the recording.

Ben Smith at Politico:

The transcript does not, in fact, make it terribly clear what they're talking about. KTVA General Manager Jerry Bever, in a statement to my colleague Byron Tau, confirms the authenticity of the recording left (in error) on the voice mail of a Miller aide but says that Miller's claims are wrong abut the details and "absurd" on their face.

If Politico is not good enough a source for skepticism, how about Brit Hume of Fox News? About a 1:20 in, he says that while "it doesn't sound very good" he added that it was still "not utterly conclusive."

Brit Hume said that. NOT UTTERLY CONCLUSIVE.

But let's even assume the "not utterly conclusive" smear that Breitbart and Palin are doing - that this tape is evidence of the TV station making stuff up. What, then, do we make of this?


About 2:15 in, Fox News reporter Dan Miller says that his staff could find no bias or "hit pieces" against Joe Miller.

So, the charge itself floats up from a less-than-credible source. It's not clear from the tape or the transcript what they're talking about. Brit Hume himself says it's not utterly conclusive and then no bias can be found in the station's reporting on Miller himself.

Tell me again who the corrupt bastards are?

You'd Think They'd Learn

From the Op-Ed page of today's Tribune-Review:

Congress must ensure that successor organizations don't circumvent its ban on federal funding of the defunct national ACORN and its affiliates.

That defunding happened after video of Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now workers helpfully advising a purported pimp and prostitute made continuance of Obama Democrats' longtime ACORN love affair politically untenable. Now, Congress must ensure that old flame isn't rekindled.

They're basing this on the O'Keefe pimp tapes??
For those of you who don't know (and there maybe one or two) O'Keefe lied his way through the tapes:


They know the pimp story's crap, right? O'Keefe's pimp costume was no where to be found when he was taping in the ACORN offices. He never presented himself as a pimp. It was plainly dishonest. They know O'Keefe's a creep, right? The Pimp hoax was posted on Breitbart's website - they know Breitbart's a liar, don't they? Then why even touch the story? The clue (inadvertant projection as it is) can be found in the op-ed's last few lines:

ACORN's Washington sweethearts must think taxpayers -- and lawmakers -- have awfully short memories. Hopefully, enough remember ACORN scandals to deny federal funding to its renamed affiliates.

They're hoping YOU have a short memory and have forgotten that O'Keefe and Breitbart have no credibility whatsoever.

But then again, this is the Tribune-Review we're talking here.

More On James O'Keefe (Conservative "Investigative Reporter")

Some highlights of Conservative Journalism:

• Christopher Ruddy: Main pusher of the universally debunked "murder" of Vince Foster
• James Guckert (aka Jeff Gannon): Male escort given extraordinary access to the Bush White House in order to lob softball questions during press briefings
• Andrew Breitbart: Serial video faker
• James O'Keefe: Employed by Breitbart, fake pimp, another video faker...

And now total and complete creep (as if he was ever anything otherwise).

The story from CNN:

A conservative activist known for making undercover videos plotted to embarrass a CNN correspondent by recording a meeting on hidden cameras aboard a floating "palace of pleasure" and making sexually suggestive comments, e-mails and a planning document show.

James O'Keefe, best known for hitting the community organizing group ACORN with an undercover video sting, hoped to get CNN Investigative Correspondent Abbie Boudreau onto a boat filled with sexually explicit props and then record the session, those documents show.

By the way, those ACORN videos?

The videos led to some of the employees being fired and contributed to the disbanding of ACORN, which advocated for low- and middle-income and worked to register voters.

But prosecutors in New York and California eventually found no evidence of wrongdoing by the group, and the California probe found the videos had been heavily and selectively edited.

For the record.

The plan revolved around getting CNN reporter Abbie Boudreau into a boat (a "pleasure palace"). In the boat would be video equipment (hidden, of course, so as to be able to video the upcoming tryst) and some other props:

1. condom jar
2. dildos
3. lube
4. porn
5. candles
6. viagra
7. fuzzy handcuffs
8. blindfold

Which he was gonna use to seduce Ms Boudreau and video it. Misogynist, creepy, disgusting.

This is the current state of Conservative Investigative Reporting, ladies and gentlemen.

By the way Mediamatters reports that there's legislation in the house (from Pete Olson of Texas) "honoring" O'Keefe for his (now fraudulent) work on ACORN.

According to Mediamatters, there are 31 cosponsors on this. Included is Pennsylvania's very own Joseph Pitts (PA-16).

An Interesting Twist

By the pricking of my thumbs
Something tea part this way comes. [not-MacBeth]

That darling of the tea-party, Sarah Palin endorsed Christine O'Donnell, anti-gay, anti-science, anti-masturbation GOP candidate for the United States Senate from the Great State of Delaware has been lying about her education. More than twice.

Talking Points Memo has the story (both of them).

First it was Oxford University:

Senate nominee Christine O'Donnell (R-DE) proclaimed on her LinkedIn the University of Oxford under "education," but it turns out that's another exaggeration on her resume. The claim is that O'Donnell earned a certificate from an Oxford course which her campaign said is "overseen" by a summer seminar program called the Phoenix Institute.

The TPM story leads back to this at the Washington Post:

O'Donnell's LinkedIn bio page lists "University of Oxford" as one of the schools she attended, claiming she studied "Post Modernism in the New Millennium." But it turns out that was just a course conducted by an institution known as the Phoenix Institute, which merely rented space at Oxford.

What's more, the woman who oversaw Phoenix Institute's summer program at Oxford tells me O'Donnell's claim about studying at Oxford is "misleading."

By itself, O'Donnell's Oxford claim might not matter too much. But the larger context is that O'Donnell has already been nabbed fudging her education record not once, but twice. She claimed for several years to have graduated from Fairleigh Dickinson Unversity, but she actually obtained her bachelor's degree last summer. And in a lawsuit she suggested she was trying for a Master's degree courses at Princeton -- but subsequently acknowledged she hadn't taken a single Princeton graduate course.

Princeton, too?

Then there's this:

Claremont Graduate University tells TPM that Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell did not attend the Southern California school despite listing it under education on her LinkedIn profile.

But here's the twist:

Turns out O'Donnell (R-DE) did receive a fellowship from a conservative think tank named the Claremont Institute, also in Claremont, Ca. but not affiliated with Claremont Graduate University.

While feeding the ear worm "It's a small world, after all" guess who sends gobs of money to the Claremont Institute?

My best friend 4-evah Richard Mellon Scaife.

According to mediamatters, the foundations he controls (Carthage, Sarah Scaife) have given $4.8 million dollars to the Institute over the last two decades. That's more than any other foundation, by the way.

In yet another ear worm moment, O'Donnell was a 2002 Lincoln Fellow. Did you know that another paragon of honesty is among the 2009 Lincoln Fellows?

Andrew Breitbart.

In 2009, the Scaife sent $375,000 to the Claremont Institute.

y god, his crap is everywhere!

Scott Baker (formerly of WTAE) is now working for Glenn Beck

Beck and Baker from some or other wingnut broadcast.

First, credit where credit is due: I heard this story today on Lynn Cullen's City Paper broadcast.

It looks like former WTAE Pittsburgh news anchor Scott Baker is descending further down the rat hole of wingnut "journalism."

First some background.

If you recall, back in 2005 while Baker was still an anchor of the 5:00 PM news at WTAE, he credited himself as being one of Jeff Gannon journalism teachers. Gannon (James Dale Guckert) became controversial for being a "reporter" with White House press credentials who asked President Bush such an excessively deferential and factually inaccurate question that he was dubbed by Jon Stewart as "Chip Rightwingenstein of the Bush Agenda Gazette." It later turned out that Gannon had scores of nude photos on the Internet on gay escort sites.

Next, in 2007 Baker signed up to help launch BreitbartTV. Yes, that would be with conservative hack and serial liar Andrew Breitbart of the manufactured ACORN and Shirley Sherrod controversies.

Apparently not satisfied that he had fully plumbed the depths of wingnut "journalism" Baker has now signed on to help Glenn Beck start up his "news and opinion" website called The Blaze (Here's Baker interviewing for a job with Beck interviewing Glenn Beck.)

According to The Huffington Post:

Beck said he was frustrated with the way the media covered his "Restoring Honor" rally this weekend.

"Too many times we see mainstream media outlets distorting facts to fit rigid agendas," he wrote on The Blaze. "Not that you've ever heard me complain about the media before. Okay, maybe once or twice. But there comes a time when you have to stop complaining and do something. And so we decided to hire some actual journalists to launch a new website."

So, Glenn Beck and Scott Baker are are setting themselves up as the saviors of journalism.

I can't stop laughing crying laughing.

NOTE to City Paper's Chris Potter: Yes, I beat you at blogging on this story -- consequences be damned (but seriously, thanks for the mention on Lynn's show).
.

Pat Toomey Fact-Checked

Republican Senatorial Candidate Pat Toomey in a piece in Monday's Post-Gazette wrote that were he in the Senate right now, he'd (no surprise here) oppose her confirmation to the Supreme Court.

As with most political writing, when you look at the details you'll see how much spin there is.

And there's a sizable amount in Toomey's piece. It's embarrassing how easily he uses the by now debunked conservative talking points. Pennsylvania deserves a better candidate.

I fear I am getting ahead of myself. Let's look at the piece.

Toomey gives three reasons why he'd oppose and that's where the spin sits.

Point one:

The Commerce Clause of the Constitution's Article I permits Congress to regulate economic activity between the states. This is of course necessary for a well-functioning national economy. Regrettably, the clause has become the vehicle of choice for judges and politicians to expand federal power into every manner of human activity, despite extremely attenuated connections to interstate commerce.

In recent years the Supreme Court has shown an encouraging willingness to reign in Commerce Clause abuses. However, in her Judiciary Committee testimony, Ms. Kagan expressed a view that envisions practically no limit to federal power. She would not even rule out the farcical example of a federal power to force citizens to eat three helpings of fruits and vegetables each day, all in the name of "regulating commerce." That view turns the notion of a government of enumerated powers on its head, substituting the anti-constitutional notion that that which is not expressly forbidden to Congress is thereby permitted.

Really? She would not "rule out" the government forcing citizens to eat their veggies??

Um, no. Here's the story from politico.com:

Republicans are pouncing on the less-than-crystal-clear answer Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan gave late in Tuesday's confirmation hearing to a question from Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) about whether the government has the right to micromanage Americans' diets.

"If I wanted to sponsor a bill and it said Americans, you have to eat three vegetables and three fruits every day and I got it through Congress and that’s now the law of the land, got to do it, does that violate the commerce clause?" Coburn asked.

"Sounds like a dumb law," Kagan replied. "But I think that the question of whether it’s a dumb law is different from the question of whether it’s constitutional, and I think that courts would be wrong to strike down laws that they think are senseless just because they’re senseless."

So she thinks it would be "a dumb law." Huh. Toomey didn't say that, did he? Nor did he point out what politico writes a few paragraphs later:

While it's true that Kagan never definitively answered Coburn's question, the pair spent nearly 10 minutes discussing the issue. In comments she made after the brief clip the GOP posted, Kagan indicated that laws that regulated noneconomic activity, which presumably would include eating, were beyond Congress's commerce clause power. [emphasis added]

Ah. Later on she responds to Senator Coburn some more:

Well, Sen. Coburn, I guess a few points. The first: I think there are limits on the Commerce Clause, which are the ones that are articulated by the Court that were articulated by the Court in Morrison and in Lopez. Which are primarily about non-economic activity and Congress not being able to regulate non-economic activity. I guess the second point I would make is I do think that very early in our history and especially I would look to Gibbons v. Ogden, where Chief Justice Marshall did, in the first case about these issues, essentially read that clause broadly and provide real deference to legislatures and provide real deference to Congress about the scope of that clause, not that that clause doesn’t have any limits, but that deference should be provided to Congress with respect to matters that affect interstate commerce. And I guess the third point is just to say that I think that $1.6 trillion deficit may be an enormous problem—it may be an enormous problem. But I don’t think it’s a problem for courts to solve. I think it’s a problem for the political process to solve.

Look at that. She's talking about the Supreme Court acting in deference to the Congress. That if the Congress passed a senseless law, that doesn't mean it's necessarily unconstitutional. What would be said about her if she said otherwise?

That's right: Judicial Activist!!

Point two:

Ms. Kagan's record is equally troubling in an area in which Congress is in fact expressly forbidden to meddle, namely, the First Amendment's guarantee of political free speech.

In arguing a case before the Supreme Court last year on behalf of the Obama administration, Ms. Kagan expressed the view that it was within Congress' power to pass a law that banned a pamphlet or book because of its advocacy of a political viewpoint. Ms. Kagan's position was rejected by the court. However, the very argument in favor of federal power to ban disfavored books is chilling. In her committee testimony, Ms. Kagan defended her action as simply advocating the government's view at the time, but she did not expressly disavow that view when she easily could have and should have.

Oh. My. God. She wants to ban books??

Um no. And if Toomey's spin on the veggies is only slightly dishonest, this one's a humdinger. From Slate.com:

To understand how Kagan could be tarred as a proponent of censorship and a protector of incumbents, one needs more context than Bossie offers. For decades, federal law has said that if a for-profit corporation or labor union wanted to produce anything expressly calling for the election or defeat of a federal candidate, it had to use funds from a political action committee, or PAC. The corporation could pay all the expenses to set up and run the PAC, and the PAC could ask corporate officers, directors, shareholders, and others to donate funds to it for political purposes. The corporation itself could endorse a candidate for office at a press conference, and, of course, real live individuals associated with the corporation could both donate money to federal candidates and spend unlimited sums supporting or opposing such candidates. What the corporation could not do is spend its general treasury funds—that is, the money it received from selling sneakers or software—for candidate elections.

And then:

At issue in Citizens United was whether an ideological corporation that did take corporate money could be required to use its PAC to pay for cable television "video-on-demand" distribution of a documentary excoriating Hillary Clinton while she was running for the Democratic presidential nomination. The position of the government, eventually defended at the high court by the government's lawyer, Kagan, was that the PAC requirement was constitutional as applied to television content paid for from Citizens United's general treasury funds. Justice Breyer explained the basis for the McCain-Feingold rule in the Citizens United oral argument: "Look, [Congress] said the compelling interest is that people think that representatives are being bought, okay? That's to put it in a caricature, but you understand what I'm driving at, okay? …. So Congress now says precisely that interest leads us to want to limit the expenditures that corporations can make on electioneering communication in the last 30 days of a primary, over-the-air television, but not on radio, not on books, not on pamphlets, not on anything else. All right?"

So the question for the court was whether this corporation had to pay for its television content out of a separate fund. It did not involve books at all, much less the ability of the government to ban books or any other form of political speech.

And then finally:

But what has so exercised Sen. McConnell, David Bossie, and others is Kagan's statement at argument—in response to more pressing by the conservative justices—that if a corporation produced "a pamphlet" directly calling for the election or defeat of a federal candidate ("Vote against Smith"), it would have to pay for it with its PAC funds. This is hardly the stuff of book-banning and government censorship. As Justice Stevens explained in his dissent in Citizens United, to call the PAC requirement a "ban" is "highly misleading, and needs to be corrected."

Ah...So Pat says Kagan said Congress could pass a law banning books because of its advocacy of a political viewpoint, he was just plain wrong (or he was being deceptive - we report you decide).

But the big braciola is this:

Third, Ms. Kagan's decision as dean of Harvard Law School to deny military recruiters equal access to students is quite problematic. I share the view that the "don't ask, don't tell" policy regarding gay servicemen and women has outlived its usefulness and, subject to the military's conclusion of the feasibility of removing it, I support its repeal. However, one's disagreement with a federal law does not give one license to circumvent it. It took the Supreme Court itself unanimously deciding against Ms. Kagan's position to get her to reverse course.

Really? Kagan circumvented federal law?

Um, no. As I posted back in June, Elena was following federal law. Lookee here. This is from the New York Times article I quoted:

Because of the military’s policy against openly gay soldiers, the law school in 1979 barred military recruiters from using its Office of Career Services, the central clearinghouse through which employers from all over the world seek to recruit top-notch law students.

But in the mid-1990s, Congress approved several versions of the Solomon Amendment — named for Representative Gerald B. H. Solomon, a conservative Republican from upstate New York — denying federal funds to schools that barred military recruiters.

The amendment forced many law schools to carve out a military exception to their recruitment policies, which said they would not help employers that discriminated in their hiring practices.

Harvard reached its own accommodation in 1996. While the school did not allow military recruiters to use its main placement office, it did allow them on campus through the Harvard Law School Veterans Association, a student group. The recruiters met with students in the same classrooms, just under different sponsorship.

And:

Ms. Kagan did join more than half the faculty in January 2004 in signing an amicus brief when a coalition of law schools challenged Solomon in an appeal to the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, in Philadelphia.

In November 2004, the appeals court ruled, 2 to 1, that Solomon was unconstitutional, saying it required law schools “to express a message that is incompatible with their educational objectives.”

The day after the ruling, Ms. Kagan — and several other law school deans — barred military recruiters from their campuses. In Harvard’s case, the recruiters were barred only from the main career office, while Ms. Kagan continued to allow them access to students through the student veterans’ group.

But the ban lasted only for the spring semester in 2005. The Pentagon told the university over the summer that it would withhold “all possible funds” if the law school continued to bar recruiters from the main placement office. So, after consulting with other university officials, Ms. Kagan said, she lifted the ban.

Now go back and look at what Pat wrote. Since the Solomon amendment was ruled unconstitutional, it wasn't "federal law." So saying she "circumvented" it is just a lie.

In an age when the conservative press is driven (or at least tainted) by Breitbart-like journalism, it's important now for every conservative politician to be as squeaky clean honest as possible.

It's sad to see that Pat Toomey isn't being as honest as he needs to be to be Senator.

Jack Kelly Sunday

This past Wednesday, I sent an email to a couple of friends (I'll refer to the first as "Friend A" and the second as "Friend B") this question:

How much you wanna bet on who mentions the Shirley Sherrod/Andrew Breitbart thing first - Jack Kelly or the Trib?

Friend A wrote back first:

Kelly has to wait until Sunday, so...

Good thing Friend A did not take the bet because it was Jack Kelly who was the first to mention l'Affaire Sherrod. He did it today.

When I pointed that out this morning, Friend B responded with a hearty yet succinct:

LOL

I have no idea whether Friend B would have taken the bet either but I should have gotten a few beers out of it. Or maybe a donut. A wafer thin mint, perhaps.

But I digress.

Jack's column is the usual, I guess. Immediately deflect the discussion to someplace else and then go from there. Here's Jack's opening:

Tainting the tea party with the charge of racism is proving to be an effective tactic for Democrats," Mary Frances Berry, a former chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, told the Webzine Politico Tuesday.

"There is no evidence tea party adherents are any more racist than other Republicans, and indeed many other Americans," said Ms. Berry, who is now a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. "But getting them to spend their time purging their ranks and having candidates distance themselves should help Democrats win in November. Having one's opponent rebut charges of racism is far better than discussing joblessness."

In 2008, a group of liberal journalists discussed how to handle news coverage of Barack Obama's long association with his hate-spewing pastor, Jeremiah Wright.

"If the right forces us all to either defend Wright or tear him down, no matter what we choose, we lose," Spencer Ackerman, now of Wired magazine, said in an e-mail to colleagues on Journolist. "Instead, take one of them -- [Weekly Standard editor] Fred Barnes, [former Bush aide] Karl Rove, who cares -- and call them racists."

Journolist was a list-serve created by The Washington Post's Ezra Klein. He shut it down after conservative commentators Tucker Carlson and Andrew Breitbart obtained e-mails members had sent to each other.

Journolist and Jeremiah Wright? And this involves Shirley Sherrod and Andrew Breitbart how? The issue is ostensibly about her, her speech, how Andrew Breitbart lied to the public with a selective editing of it, and her cowardly firing. To jump right in the matter and, within three paragraphs, to mention Jeremiah Wright is nothing more than a desperate diversion.

And I suppose it's is intended to plant in the reader's mind the phrase:

See? The Left does it too!

Except they don't. To quote Crooksandliars:

[W]here exactly are these misleading video clips posted from the left that destroy people?

Show me.

Let's turn, with this in mind to the end of Jack's column. Remember, he's commenting on Andrew Breitbart's use of a clip so edited that it appears to say something that it doesn't.

Now here's Jackie:

If Mr. Breitbart had the whole tape and released only a misleading portion, he's committed an offense as vile as Think Progress did when it chopped up the remarks of a tea partier, who was standing next to his black wife, to give the false impression he was racially prejudiced.

Whether Breitbart had the whole tape and edited it himself or merely received the edited version, his offense is the same. He failed to show the context of Sherrod's story and in doing so allowed his audience to think something of her that just isn't true. It's a lie and Breitbart is a liar regardless. (Keep telling yourself that and remember that the next time he posts something that gurgles up into the mainstream media.)

In any event Jack, did you think I couldn't find the Think Progress video? Here it is:


The gentleman Jack mentions shows up right at the beginning (about 7 seconds in). At that point the man says of President Obama:

He's too black to be President.

Sounds pretty racist to me.

But then, about 30 seconds later in the tape we hear him saying:

It's nothing racial. If you look at my wife, it's not the color of his skin that troubles me.

So where's the deception? Where's the deception as vile (Jack's phrase) as the one shown by Andrew Breitbart?

T'Ain't there. Indeed, if anything, the reality of that short short clip is precisely the opposite of what Breitbart did. As clumsy as it may have been, at least Think Progress included the video of the man reassuring us he wasn't a racist because the woman he identifies as his wife is black. How it invalidates the man's previous racist statement, I am not sure. And Jack, of course, leaves that part out.

This is Jack's evidence showing Think Progress doing something as vile as Andrew Breitbart.

I will include something I agree with from Jack's column (sit down, Ed. I know that's a shocker!):

Mr. Breitbart said his source sent him only the portion of the tape he aired. Even if he had no intent to deceive, it was reckless of him to release the excerpt without learning more about its context. He owes Ms. Sherrod an apology.

But it wasn't Mr. Breitbart who fired Ms. Sherrod without giving her a chance to tell her side of the story. To liberals as well as conservatives, the administration appears rash, cynical, weak and disingenuous.

Can't say I can disagree with that last part.

And if you're looking for any more evidence for racist elements in the tea party movement, go back to the video above and listen carefully at about second 28. A man with dark sunglasses is asked "Why do you hate Mexicans?" and he answers:

Because they're filthy stinking animals.

Yea - no racism there.

More On Breitbart's Smear

An update.

So far both the White House and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack have apologized to Shirley Sherrod:

The Obama administration issued an extraordinary public apology Wednesday and offered to reinstate a federal official who was fired after she appeared to make racial comments on a misleading snippet of video.

When it became clear that Shirley Sherrod's comments had been taken out of context, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack spoke to her by phone to apologize and to ask if she would return to the department.

And in what must be a new definition of chutzpah, Andrew Breitbart has even chimed in:

Andrew Breitbart, who posted the clip of USDA official Shirley Sherrod that got her fired, said today that he feels sorry for Sherrod.

"I feel bad that they made this about her, and I feel sorry that they made this about her," he told MSNBC. "Watching how they've misconstrued, how the media has misconstrued the intention behind this, I do feel a sympathy for her plight."

Breitbart says his intention was never to prove that Sherrod, until this week the Georgia state director for rural development, was racist. He says the video he posted proves instead that the NAACP is racist, because of the audience's reaction to her speech.

That last part? That's just bullshit.

From Mediamatters:

Since his smear of Sherrod was repudiated, Breitbart has claimed that his story is "not about Shirley Sherrod" but rather about "the NAACP." In fact, in his initial post on July 19, Breitbart claimed that the video is "evidence of racism coming from a federal appointee" and that Sherrod discriminated against a white farmer in her "federal duties" as the USDA Georgia Director of Rural Development. The video itself also included text that said, "Ms. Sherrod admits that in her federally appointed position, overseeing over a billion dollars she discriminates against people due to their race." Breitbart also posted a tweet on July 19 asking, "Will Eric Holder's DOJ hold accountable fed appointee Shirley Sherrod for admitting practicing racial discrimination?" After the USDA forced Sherrod out of her position in response to the deceptive video, Big Government celebrated with a post titled: "Racist Govt Official/NAACP Award Recipient Resigns after Big Government Expose."

And Breitbart bullshit part II:

In a July 20 Fox News appearance, Breitbart claimed that the video proves there are racists among the NAACP because "the audience was laughing and applauding as she described how she maltreated the white farmer," and he argued that the audience did not "know that there was going to be a point of redemption" in her story. On a July 21 appearance on ABC's Good Morning America, Breitbart again claimed that his video shows that "at an NAACP event, people are applauding racism." But in his initial post, Breitbart described the audience reaction as only "nodding approval and murmurs of recognition and agreement," not applause. Indeed, a review of the full video indicates that the NAACP audience does not applaud at any point in her story about her interaction with the farmer.

Apart from Shirley Sherrod, no one looks good in this. The wingnut press (Andrew Breitbart, Fox "News" and so on) for lying, the mainstream press for not (not ever) calling them on it and finally and unforgivingly the Obama Administration for caving so quickly.

A pox on all their houses.

Breitbart admits lying; being insufferable asshole

In yet another twist in the Breitbart/Sherrod story, Andrew Breitbart admitted on his BigGovernment blog yesterday to lying and being an "insufferable asshole."

He further confessed to believing that "the ends justify the means" and to engaging in "open political warfare."

NOTE: No Breitbart-style journalistic ethics and standards were harmed in the making of this post.
.

Anatomy of (Yet Another) Right Wing Smear

Mediamatters has the story:

Based on what appears to be selectively edited footage, Andrew Breitbart falsely suggested that Shirley Sherrod said that, in her former position with the USDA, she had discriminated against a white farmer. In fact, Sherrod's statements in the video corroborate her statement that the story she was discussing is 24 years old.

Turns out that the video was edited. Edited to the point where it said almost exactly the opposite of what Breitbart said it said. Here's Breitbart (by way of mediamatters):

We are in possession of a video from in which Shirley Sherrod, USDA Georgia Director of Rural Development, speaks at the NAACP Freedom Fund dinner in Georgia. In her meandering speech to what appears to be an all-black audience, this federally appointed executive bureaucrat lays out in stark detail, that her federal duties are managed through the prism of race and class distinctions.

In the first video, Sherrod describes how she racially discriminates against a white farmer. She describes how she is torn over how much she will choose to help him. And, she admits that she doesn't do everything she can for him, because he is white. Eventually, her basic humanity informs that this white man is poor and needs help. But she decides that he should get help from "one of his own kind". She refers him to a white lawyer.

Sherrod's racist tale is received by the NAACP audience with nodding approval and murmurs of recognition and agreement. Hardly the behavior of the group now holding itself up as the supreme judge of another groups' racial tolerance.

The full video vindicates her story that she was taken out of context. She was discussing incident that occurred 24 years ago and how that incident made her realize that:

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.

That last part was in the full video, but not in the edited video posted by Breitbart.

Of course, the Obama Administration demanded her resignation (and got it).
Given that this is a complete smear, will she get her job back?

And why should anyone trust Andrew Breitbart from now on? Remember, he's the guy who brought us the ACORN/pimp tape (so he's no stranger to edited smears).

Delusional, II

Andrew Breitbart (of breitbart.com and James O'Keefe false ACORN 'pimp' story fame) has declared that he will take "down the institutional left" in the "next three weeks."

(He's also supremely fun to bait on Twitter and will retweet any an all criticism of himself posted there.)
.