The new heights of awful

by: Eric B.

Sun Jul 25, 2010 at 10:35:15 AM EDT

Quick, who said this?

This is what politics and race have come to. An accusation that ought to be leveled with the greatest sobriety is tossed about the way little boys fling schoolyard insults.

The same man who said this a few weeks ago:

The forum is a hootenanny of pinkos, environuts, peaceniks, Luddites, old hippies, Robin Hoods and urban hunters and gatherers. In other words, a microcosm of the Obama administration.

I feel like I say this once a month, but this morning's column by Nolan Finley descends to new depths of vile demagoguery. I don't know what his point in writing the column was, except that along the way, he used it as an excuse to attack the NAACP, the Obama administration, Jimmy Carter, the "mainstream media," and all while not identifying the people most intimately involved in Shirley Sherrod's erroneous firing over comments made public through the disgraceful act of edited footage.

Okay, a brief recap of the last week's events just to get things started. Andrew Breitbart, a Tea Party activist and guy who runs the Web site BigGovernment.com, posted edited footage that made it appear that a federal employee had made racist comments to the NAACP, that she used her position in the federal government to assist African American farmers at the expense of white farmers.  Fox News blared this edited footage until Sherrod was forced to step down. Later, it was discovered that the footage was carefully edited and that the context of the speech was that Sherrod learned through helping a white farmer that difficulties know no race, and that poor people in general need a lot more help than people with lots of money. Under pressure for having publicly pressured someone out of a job under erroneous pretenses, she was offered a job back in federal service. She is currently mulling over that offer.

We can all agree on that version of the story, because those are the facts. Here is how Nolan Finley describes the persons responsible for pushing the faked footage of the speech:

The wrongly fired federal agriculture official was instead the victim of a despicable dirty trick by a conservative blogger.

Plus Fox News. Anyway, calling Andrew Breitbart "a conservative blogger" attempts to make it sound like he's just some second-rate jackass, like the Blogprof or Gateway Pundit, someone you could otherwise dismiss as unsophisticated and with no real influence in the political dialogue. Breitbart, however, runs a Web site with real influence, as evidenced last year when his release of carefully doctored footage essentially destroyed ACORN. If it was a "despicable dirty trick by a conservative blogger" involving the issue of race, it begs the question ... shouldn't we revisit his last dabbling involving race and video footage? Right, the sound you hear from the Detroit News is the sound of crickets. In fact, here is what Nolan Finley himself wrote when Breitbart targeted ACORN late last year.

The group was cut off from some of its taxpayer dollars after conservative bloggers duped ACORN staffers into offering advice on setting up a child prostitution ring. ACORN had no defense — it was caught on tape and posted on the Web.

But ACORN is too important to Democrats and Obama in particular to allow it to wither away. Much of the taxpayer money that funds ACORN’s activism ends up benefiting Democratic interests.

Nolan Finley's evidence that ACORN was evil came from the same people using the same kind of doctored footage that got Shirley Sherrod fired from her job. But, the real injustice here isn't that Sherrod was fired under erroneous pretense. It's that she was offered employment back by the people who wronged her.

Being a class warrior won't get you fired in Barack Obama's Washington -- it'll earn you a promotion. And that's what Obama offered, along with a presidential apology.

Yes, what a thoroughly reprehensible act ... apologizing for firing someone wrongly, and then offering them a better job as a way to make things good. If only Breitbart had attacked Shirley Sherrod for being a class warrior instead of trying to paint her as a racist to make the NAACP look bad, her firing would have been cool with Nolan Finley.

Speaking of which:

Sherrod is said to be mulling the deal. Meanwhile, no word from the NAACP on how its "I'm sorry" letter to the tea party movement is coming along. This mess started with a spurious and politically calculated accusation from the civil rights organization that the tea party is a hate group driven by racism.

So, it's really the NAACP's fault that Andrew Breitbart doctored footage and got Fox News to trumpet it as evidence of the NAACP's inherent racism.

If you've been following the "JournoList" scandal, you might see parallels, like that of rightwing operatives carefully manipulating what people said to make them look bad. Nolan Finley also sees parallels, but in ways he doesn't bother to explain. In a standalone paragraph:

While the Sherrod incident was unfolding, we also learned that a group of liberal journalists banded together in 2008 to help get Obama elected. (More to come about the integrity of the press.)

I'm sure ... kind of like how the News hyped last year's Climategate scandal (to the point where editorial cartoonist Henry Payne told working climate scientists that climate science was thoroughly debunked). Anyway, a quick review here also ... a few years ago, liberal blogger Ezra Klein started an e-mail list called Journolist. There were a handful of mainstream reporters -- journalists -- but mostly it was populated by academics and bloggers. Tucker Carlson's Daily Caller got its hands on some of the e-mails circulated and tried to paint the group as some kind of shadowy cabal of elite journalists who wanted to rule the world (i.e. "a group of liberal journalists banded together in 2008 to help Obama get elected."). It ought to be noted that Carlson himself tried to join the list, but was rejected from membership because people felt he might misquote them or take things they said out of context.

Along the way, as in Climategate, as in the rightwing attack on ACORN, as in Breitbart's attack on the NAACP that got Shirley Sherrod fired, things were misquoted and distorted and taken out of context. The reality is ... well, let's go to raving leftist Kathleen Parker.

One of the most widely circulated is that these lefties were conspiring to get the government to shut down Fox News. Well, one member -- a UCLA law professor no one ever heard of (Jonathan Zasloff, sorry) -- did write something to that effect. But it was a query about whether the Federal Communications Commission could pull the network's broadcasting permit once it expires for, in liberals' view, espousing a political agenda.

Whereupon, Michael Scherer of Time responded:

"You really want political parties/white houses picking and choosing which news organizations to favor?"

Even so, the headline was that liberals want to shut down Fox News, which is not precisely an accurate rendering of a non-conversation. There was no further discussion on the subject at Journolist.

So, right, I'm sure we'll hear more on this on the News' editorial page, right up to the point where the story has lost all its legs and no longer serves as a useful club to beat over the mainstream media, at which point it will be discarded with its role in the News' commentary unconsidered.

After attacking Jimmy Carter for reasons that, in context of the Breitbart smear, make no sense, we wander to Finley's conclusion.

The obvious danger here is using the charge of racism as a tool to leverage political advantage makes it useless for its original purpose.

The NAACP should know better. It has the most to lose if "racist" becomes just another "yo' mama" taunt.

You might think that the obvious danger here is not to believe people with a history of using carefully edited footage in a racially-charged manner when they produce additional racially-charged footage. But, that only works if you've acknowledged that the footage was carefully edited the first time around to make a point. But, as we all see, the real villain here is the NAACP, so I guess that's probably not going to happen.