Shirley She Can't Be Serious

Having already had David Gergen, their senior political analyst compare her on the air to Nelson Mandela, as Dan Riehl writes, “CNN is strongly pushing the notion that Shirley Sherrod is a uniter, dedicated to bringing people together:”

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However, her rhetoric beneath the headlines hardly supports that conclusion.

Sherrod’s steadfast motto: ‘Let’s work together’

Atlanta, Georgia (CNN) — Shirley Miller Sherrod has spent most of her life fighting injustice.

How is it that one unites, while casting your entire political opposition as racist, without any evidence to support the charge? That is what Sherrod actually does. And she does it consistently.

source: You know, I haven’t seen such a mean-spirited people as I’ve seen lately over this issue of health care. Some of the racism we thought was buried. Didn’t it surface? Now, we endured eight years of the Bush’s and we didn’t do the stuff these Republicans are doing because you have a black President.

I’ve seen people, including some on the Right, claiming Sherrod deserves an apology from Andrew Breitbart. Fair enough, though I disagree. But I wonder, will those same truth seekers call on Sherrod to apologize for charging that, what Breitbart really wants is a genuine return to slavery? Or, shall we assume that the apology seekers actually agree with her? Come on, pundits. Don’t let your inkwells go dry, now. This is just getting fun – or rather unfunny, perhaps. Are these the words of someone who ever truly forgives someone over issues involving race?

On Andrew Breitbart: I know I’ve gotten past black versus white. He’s probably the person who’s never gotten past it and never attempted to get past it.

I think he would like to get us stuck back in the times of slavery. That’s where I think he would like to see all black people end up again.

COOPER: You think — you think he’s racist?

SHERROD: … I think he’s so vicious. Yes, I do.

And I think that’s why he’s so vicious against a black president, you know. He would go after me. I don’t think it was even the NAACP he was totally after. I think he was after a black president.

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Which of course means that Sherrod has never visited his Websites, which feature contributions from numerous prominent black conservatives and libertarians, including:

And Sherrod’s language is almost identical to how she attempted to define Fox News when speaking with the far left Media Matters earlier this week:

“They are after a bigger thing, they would love to take us back to where we were many years ago. Back to where black people were looking down, not looking white folks in the face, not being able to compete for a job out there and not be a whole person.”

Huh. Even Howard Kurtz, the media critic who’s employed by both CNN and the JournoList-tainted Washington Post wrote yesterday:

But for all the chatter—some of it from Sherrod herself—that she was done in by Fox News, the network didn’t touch the story until her forced resignation was made public Monday evening, with the exception of brief comments by O’Reilly. After a news meeting Monday afternoon, an email directive was sent to the news staff in which Fox Senior Vice President Michael Clemente said: “Let’s take our time and get the facts straight on this story. Can we get confirmation and comments from Sherrod before going on-air. Let’s make sure we do this right.”

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More from Kurtz:

Sherrod may be the only official ever dismissed because of the fear that Fox host Glenn Beck might go after her. As Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack tried to pressure her into resigning, Sherrod says Deputy Under Secretary Cheryl Cook called her Monday to say “do it, because you’re going to be on ‘Glenn Beck’ tonight.” And for all the focus on Fox, much of the mainstream media ran with a fragmentary story that painted an obscure 62-year-old Georgian as an unrepentant racist…. Ironically, Beck defended Sherrod on Tuesday, saying that “context matters” and he would have objected if someone had shown a video of him at an AA meeting saying he used to pass out from drinking but omitting the part where he says he found Jesus and gave up alcohol.

As Victorino Matus wrote at the Weekly Standard:

So you’ve got members of the media who jumped to conclusions, leading to Secretary Vilsack and the White House reacting rashly, and Sherrod, among others, making hasty judgments about a network’s coverage of the whole mess. Have we all forgotten that age-old advice about jumping to conclusions?

Or as the president said yesterday:

“If there’s a lesson to be drawn from this episode, it’s that rather than us jumping to conclusions and pointing fingers at each other, we should all look inward and try to examine what’s in our own hearts and, as a consequence, I think we will continue to make progress,” he said.

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Hopefully Shirley will take the president’s words to heart as well.

Update: James Taranto adds:

It is entirely fair to observe that Breitbart’s Monday report on Sherrod was journalistically shoddy. He misinterpreted a quote whose meaning was at best ambiguous. He should have sought out the full speech (the NAACP has posted it here), and he should have given Sherrod an opportunity to comment.

But the NAACP’s defense that it was “snookered” by Breitbart–and Frum’s implication, in turn, that Breitbart is the only “villain” of the piece–is laughable. Are we to believe that Ben Jealous thought Breitbart was what Dan Rather, before his fall, claimed to be–an impartial and reliable purveyor of facts? In the unlikely event that the answer to that question is yes, doesn’t his failure to know better reflect a stunning incompetence?

No, you can’t cheat an honest man. Breitbart set a trap for the NAACP, and the NAACP walked right into it. He was able to do so because he correctly identified the organization’s moral weakness. Confronted by a video showing apparent racism at an NAACP function, its leaders appear to have panicked and made a snap decision to denounce one of their own so as to pre-empt the charge of employing a double standard.

It was a very effective bit of Alinskyite political theater, and in a way more so for Breitbart’s having gotten the story wrong. As it turned out, the NAACP condemned Shirley Sherrod based on a false, secondhand accusation of racism. Members of the Tea Party movement know just how she feels.

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“Breitbart set a trap for the NAACP, and the NAACP walked right into it,” Taranto writes. And quite possibly, so did the country’s Alinskyite in Chief.

Update: “Shirley Sherrod has become a constant presence on TV. The White House ought to get Vernon Jordan to find her a job in the private sector, because she’s giving off definite Cindy Sheehan vibes. The question is, will she attempt the rare Full Ginsburg?”

Update: Jonah Goldberg adds:

I see. So Shirley Sherrod, who didn’t know who Andrew Breitbart was 72 hours ago, now knows him well enough to say that he wants to put all blacks back into slavery.   If I were David Axelrod, I’d be calling this woman and beg her to stop talking. And, yes, she does owe Andrew an apology.

Can a person go under the Obama bus twice? Survey says…yes!

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