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.

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).