Juggling the Sherrod Chainsaw
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.
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Poor Peggy Noonan! She has become the tail of the kite and is always a day late and has become a reactionary with no vision. Maybe she can write childrens books. As for Sherrod she will never be on any live show again if she wants the money her Bro promised her. If she speaks out she strikes out on the money. We can all agree that the whole video should have been made available but as it turns out Sherrod probably wishes it had never been shown in any length.
Peggy suffers from the same ailment as does the NAACP. Declining relevance. The NAACP is so irrelevant now, the leaders are out there claiming that the Sherrod case shows how the NAACP is still relevant.
As for Peggy, she is still “out there.” Way out.
heheh, DON’T DOWDIFY ME BRO! DON’T DOWDIFY ME
The more the Sherrods speak, the worse they look.
They’re a sick mess.
If you were Shirley and thought you had not done anything wrong, after all you gave the speech and knew what was said, why would you be so quick to resign? If it were me and I thought I was in the right I would have told them, fire me if you think I said or did something wrong. What gives here?
A rancid clue to this woman’s (and her husband’s) true inner structure is their naming their daughter Russia. Yes, named for the same Communist country that we stayed locked in a Cold War with for some 50 years. It’s unfathomable; seems as unlikely to have happened as the USA electing the son of two fervent international communists as Chief Executive.
Now video of her husband, Charles Sherrod, speaking to a group of young black men has surfaced. He’s telling them “Finally, We must stop the white man and his Uncle Toms from stealing our elections. We must not be afraid to vote black. We must not be afraid to turn a black out who votes against our interests” It was unclear to me if this speech was from 1995 or 2010 – either way its pretty knarly.
“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.”
your suspicions are dumb.
even breitbart admits he didn’t do that, and he admits to nothing. he said he told his source to “send me the relevant clips”. you do know what clips are, right?
Rational and objective as always, Brian.
And none of this changes the NAACP audience reaction to Sherrod’s admitted act of racism.
Exactly. I don’t know why people keep overlooking that point.
why do i waste my time? i just have a hard time people can be this stupid.
i know you probably think you’re smarter than black people, but they actually understood the point she was making and were reacting from that understanding. just because you saw it out of context and took it the wrong way, doesn’t mean they did too.
“i know you probably think you’re smarter than black people,”
Kind of shows where your mind went when you thought of stupid. Nobody here but you implied that this discussion was about her audience being stupid.
Well said.
Sheesh…posts coming faster than we can hit F5. You’re all going to break Treacher’s trawlly. (now, that’s not something I say everyday….)