By now everyone who has been paying any attention to the US national news, knows the sorry tale of Shirley Sherrod and the cowardice of the Obama administration. Some people are calling Sherrod's unfair dismissal a case of being "Vilsacked," after the secretary of agriculture Tom Vilsack who fired her. But I suspect that she was probably also "Obamaxed."
Ousted Agriculture Department official Shirley Sherrod, who was portrayed as a racist in a selectively excerpted Internet video, on Wednesday achieved something almost unheard of in overheated Washington: swift and utter vindication. ..
"Members of this administration, members of the media, members of different political factions on both sides of this have all made determinations and judgments without a full set of facts," White House press secretary Robert Gibbssaid at his daily briefing, which CNN broadcast on a split screen with a live shot of Sherrod watching from its studio.
In the snippet of video on Breitbart's Web site, Sherrod, who is black, admitted to having been reluctant to help a white farmer who sought her aid 24 years before, when she was working for a nonprofit agency established to help black farmers.
What the clip did not show was the larger point Sherrod had made, one that was the opposite of the perception it created. From that episode, she told the NAACP audience, she had recognized her own prejudice, moved beyond it to an understanding that "there is no difference between us," and ultimately had helped the white farmer save his land.
In the reaction that followed the posting of the video, Sherrod not only was fired from her USDA post but was denounced by the Obama administration, the media and even the civil rights organization whose local chapter had invited her to speak.
Sherrod mounted her own defense in a series of appearances on CNN, and the farmer, Roger Spooner, and his family backed her up. But not until the NAACP released a video of the full speech Tuesday night did it become clear how misleading the excerpt was.
You probably already know the rest of the story. I am not surprised by the despicable race baiting by the right wing Obama haters. Almost daily, Obama is accused of being a foreigner, an illegitimate president and a reverse racist (remember Reverend Jeremiah Wright?) who hates America and white people, by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and the Fox News crew of commentators. Also, this isn't the first time that Andrew Breitbart, the conservative blogger who posted the artfully edited video of Ms Sherrod to make her look like a racist, has selectively edited videos in order to smear and discredit so called liberals, especially minorities. Many in this group (they were fewer and less organized then) went after Bill Clinton like a pack of blood hounds when he was president. That they would find everything about Obama objectionable and sinister is perfectly natural. But what I fail to understand is why liberals are so skittish when spurious charges of racism are bandied around by these jerks who barely bother to conceal their own vicious racist leanings. Clinton shrewdly orchestrated his Sister Souljah moment to reassure nervous white folks that despite his liberal policies, he was going to be stern with African Americans who did not toe the mainstream line. He later withdrew his support for Lani Guinier, his nominee for Assistant Attorney General for similar reasons. Obama, the first black president takes great pains not to appear partial towards African Americans. But being fair and impartial need not mean being terrified of race baiters. His nervousness is evident in the hasty manner in which Sherrod was railroaded. Couldn't the administration take a couple of days to investigate what else may have been included in the offending video? If Breitbart could have access to it, surely the White House and the Dept. of Agriculture could manage to find a copy.
Secretary Vilsack (a decent man) has insisted that the White House had nothing to do with the firing of Sherrod. Hard for me to believe. (Sherrod too is not convinced) I suspect that Obama is so self-consciously determined to appear even-handed on race-related matters for obvious reasons that he may have lost his customary cool when confronted with Breitbart's doctored video. I hope that he is not trying so hard to cultivate a post-racial image that he ended up behaving much as some powerful women do when they overcompensate for their gender by behaving too much like men – always an undesirable quality in honest leaders. I sincerely hope that someone can convince the president that whenever a "gotcha' situation involving race originates with the right wing, it is worth a careful second look. More often than not, there is a booby trap there somewhere.
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