Ha Ha, Sherrod You Are
Last week, breitbart.com featured a videotape of former USDA employee Shirley Sherrod (pronounced "Shuh-ROD") seeming to gloat about how, while working for an outfit largely dedicated to helping black farmers, she hadn't given a white farmer the sort of "full force" assistance she would have if he'd been a darkie. The video had been posted in response to a unanimous NAACP resolution calling for the ragtag members of that wacky, zany, they-got-ants-in-their-pants Tea Party movement to renounce what was reputedly balls-to-the-wall racism that tainted the teabaggers all the way up to their collective perineum.
The NAACP, who owned the entire videotape but were either too shiftlessly lazy to actually watch it or had viddied the whole thing but were still trippin' that Sherrod may have made bigoted comments, demanded her resignation. According to Sherrod, some higher-ups in the USDA told her to resign via telephone, and so she did.
Despite the fact that the tape was made in March of this year, and even though Sherrod, without elaboration, repeatedly accused the white farmer of trying to "act superior," and casting aside the idea that Sherrod still seems to draw a thick line in her mind between her "people" and the white farmer's "people," a full viewing of the tape revealed that she has supposedly mended her racially discriminatory ways and is now agitating for a class war rather than a race war, which many people seem to view as some sort of redemption.
The left side of the aisle pounced like hormone-injected ferrets all over Andrew Breitbart, who originally had posted the shorter segment on his website. He was roundly condemned for intentionally editing the segment—even of "doctoring" it heavily—despite a gaping lack of evidence that he'd ever seen or touched the full tape.
Sherrod went beyond such passive speculation, confidently accusing Breitbart and FOX News—which played absolutely no role in her dismissal and allegedly hadn't even directly addressed the case until after she was fired—of being racists.
Racists? How quaint! You really don't hear people being called racists much these days.
Leftward-ho media pundits used the story as slam-dunk, irrefutable, no-turning-back, do-not-pass-'Go'-and-don't-you-fucking-DARE-collect $200—"evidence" of racism.
Curiously, the "racism" was pinned not on a woman who belongs to a race-specific organization sworn to advancing that specific race—but on those who dared allege that the NAACP didn't quite have the moral high ground when it came to accusing others of favoring their own "people."
Sherrod was swiftly canonized, she received a phoned apology from Obama, and Keith Olbermann, fulminating even more than he's typically disposed to fulminate, went on a long jag accusing the cruel, heartless right-wing media of having sent Sherrod to "Devil's Island."
What the fuck else would you expect at this point?
Sherrod made the major-media rounds last week sharing her account of how her father had been murdered by a white farmer, which would make it entirely understandable that she'd have hard feelings about the Lighter Breed. My oldest brother was stabbed and strangled to death in France, and I can't fucking STAND the French because of it...well, that, and just the fact that they're French.
During last week's press junket and fast-track beatification, we heard very little mention of the fact that Sherrod and her husband had previously been awarded $300K for "pain and suffering" in a discrimination case involving black farmers. No, this frail black orchid was STILL suffering, and even though there was loud murmuring about her being reinstated to her post in the USDA or even promoted, her ideological cheerleaders were goading her to sue FOX and Breitbart out of existence.
For being racists.
I think the main difference between me and Shirley Sherrod is that if you'd given me $300K for "pain and suffering," I'd go a little easier on the French. Or at least I wouldn't be seeking eternal blood money and blaming ALL of the Frogs for what happened to my brother.
But Sherrod couldn't possibly be a race hustler who's manipulating America's violent past for personal profit. No, that villain's cape was worn strictly—and MALICIOUSLY—by the right-wing slimebags who I had mistakenly thought were merely trying to point out an instance of egregious hypocrisy on the NAACP's part.
Unfortunately for that neat-and-tidy gumballs-and-rainbows fantasy narrative, a man alleged to be Shirley's husband was caught on tape in January of this year sharing the sort of tribal sentiments which, if expressed by anyone capable of getting a sunburn, would have seen that person banished from polite society forevermore:
It's the funniest fucking thing in the world—I still haven't heard anyone in the Tea Party urging anyone to "vote white."
But we all know who the REAL racists are, don't we? Huh? No? Maybe a little?
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