While Jim Treacher enjoys the weather in Acapulco, other people will be trawling. Like John Hayward, AKA Doctor Zero. Follow the good Doc on twitter, and read him at his home and in the Hot Air Greenroom.
Shirley Sherrod ended up as the star in a video clip that was supposed to be about her audience. Both conservatives and liberals have left a lot of blood on the floor as they tried to juggle the Sherrod chainsaw over the last few days.
First, the Obama Administration panicked and fired her. Why? Because the Left has been working hard to infuse its Tea Party enemies with the stench of racism. There’s no hard evidence of racism to work with, so they had to settle for brewing up a thin, oily film of lies and insinuations. Such a mixture dissolves quickly under bright light… and the Administration was evidently haunted by the vision of Glenn Beck gleefully flipping the switch on a bank of thousand-watt bulbs. The public isn’t supposed to think too hard about that racism smear, and they’re certainly not supposed to ponder hard evidence that far more vicious sentiments exist on the Left.
The game played by the NAACP against the Tea Party involves floating a lot of vague allegations, allowing them to congeal for several months, and then popping up on TV in October to express deep concerns about this “controversial” organization. They sure didn’t need people buzzing about what Shirley Sherrod said on that video… so under the bus she goes.
Then it turned out the video was incomplete, editing out a conclusion that made her remarks much less damaging. Scientists refer to this process as “dowdification.” Apologies were tendered, and Sherrod was offered her job back. Although nobody on the Right was clamoring for her to be terminated, and getting her in hot water was never the point of releasing the video, a number of conservative pundits expressed polite regret about the trouble she was put through. Glenn Beck was among them.
Fair enough… but then some people started going further. Peggy Noonan rendered Sherrod in stained glass, portraying her as a saintly healer bubbling with beautiful speeches. A number of other bashful conservative pundits lined up to place votive candles behind her.
The joke was on everyone as the Sherrod chainsaw howled to life. She announced that Fox News was just using her as a “pawn” 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.” She dragged out the wheezy old canard that all opposition to the policies of our glorious Leader Of Color are due to racism. And the true motivation of Andrew Breitbart? Why, nothing less than the reinstitution of slavery. Once Shirley Sherrod is out of the way, there will be nothing to stop Breitbart from using his giant mechanical spider to kidnap the President and reboot the Confederacy.
This is all terribly embarrassing for anyone on the Right who went further than offering honest sympathy for the distress this woman might have suffered at the hands of the Obama Administration. It’s even worse for the Obama Administration.
Nobody on the Right should be terribly surprised to learn the full extent of Sherrod’s racial obsessions. It takes some rigid ideology to pry open the door to the comfortable government office she used to occupy. There are an awful lot of theories floating through the mind of the permanent entitlement bureaucracy, and none of them have anything to do with individual responsibility, sovereign liberty, or the moral independence of free men and women. Peggy Noonan, like the rest of America, would do well to focus on what the NAACP is, not what it was. They aren’t much interested in post-racial speakers.
What Sherrod says during the remaining fourteen minutes of her celebrity is doing a lot more damage than anything she said on that videotape. Moral of the story: do your homework before you stick a glow-in-the-dark statue of someone to your dashboard. I have a suspicion the only figure in the Sherrod saga who took the time to understand her, or even read the full transcript of her speech, was Andrew Breitbart.