All,
Of all the endlessly embarrassing, incredibly egregious, yet utterly predictable 'racial incidents' to befall the Obama administration this has got to be one of the absolute worst. It serves the President right that he and his administration has become so 'spooked' by the typically vicious dirty tricks hijinks of the racist rightwing in this country that they would wind up being exposed as incompetent COWARDS for not even having the decency to actually find out what happened in Sherrod's situation before immediately passing a negative judgment on and firing her without any hearing or investigation of the facts whatsoever. Once again as in the equally cowardly dismissals of other black activists and officials over the past year by Obama like Van Jones, Desiree Rogers, and the ACORN organization (as well as the ludicrous 'beer summit' at the White House after Harvard professor Dr. Henry Louis Gates was racially profiled and arrested in his own home), his administration has stupidly relied on the blatant racist lies, distortions, and deadly con games of the far right wing media to determine their course of action whenever an African American is falsely accused in public by the cretinous likes of such hysterically racist and brazen reactionary assholes as Andrew Breitbart, Bill O' Reilly, and Glenn Beck et al. The President should have the common decency to call a press conference and publically apologize himself for allowing his Secretary of Agriculture to unjustly fire Ms. Sherrod in the first place. He should but I don't think he has the GUTS to do so...Just pathetic...
This is what always happens when black folks fail to protect themselves and their people from the machinations of their/our many enemies. You would think that Obama would clearly understand all that by now. But if you don't have the sense and courage to stand on principle and FIGHT BACK this is what inevitably happens...
(Please note: Ms. Sherrod also happens to be the wife of the legendary civil rights activist and brilliant SNCC organizer Charles Sherrod)
Kofi
Meanwhile...
THE GREAT KEITH OLBERMANN TYPICALLY LAYS DOWN THE LAW AND TELLS THE WHOLE TRUTH AND NOTHING BUT ABOUT THIS DISGRACEFUL EPISODE AND WHAT IT REALLY MEANS. THANK YOU KEITH FOR ELOQUENTLY SPEAKING TRUTH TO POWER NO MATTER WHAT. IF ONLY THERE WERE MANY MORE LIKE YOU IN THE NATIONAL MEDIA AND AMERICAN SOCIETY GENERALLY...
ARE YOU LISTENING BARACK? WAKE UP!! DADDY HUBRIS AND MAMA RACISM ARE GONNA GET YOU IF YOU DON'T...
July 21, 2010
With Apology, Fired Official Is Offered a New Job
From left: USDA, via Associated Press; Johnny Clark/APTV; Stephen Crowley/The New York Times; Alex Wong/Getty Images
Shirley Sherrod’s story about her work with Roger Spooner, second from left, was the subject of a post on the Web site of Andrew Breitbart, third from left, that led to Ms. Sherrod’s dismissal by Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, who has offered her a new job.
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG, SHAILA DEWAN and BRIAN STELTER
July 21, 2010
New York Times
This article was reported by Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Shaila Dewan and Brian Stelter and was written by Ms. Stolberg.
WASHINGTON — The White House and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack apologized profusely and repeatedly on Wednesday to a black midlevel official for the way she had been humiliated and forced to resign her Agriculture Department job after a conservative blogger put out a misleading video clip that seemed to show her admitting antipathy toward a white farmer.
By the end of the day, the official, Shirley Sherrod, had gained instant fame and emerged as the heroine of a compelling story about race and redemption.
Pretty much everyone else had egg on his face — from the conservative bloggers and pundits who first pushed the inaccurate story to Mr. Vilsack, who looked stricken as he told reporters he had offered Ms. Sherrod, until Monday the Agriculture Department’s rural development director in Georgia, a new job that would give her a “unique opportunity” to help the agency move past its checkered civil rights history. She told him she would think about it.
“This is a good woman, she’s been put through hell and I could have and should have done a better job,” Mr. Vilsack said, as he conceded that he had ordered Ms. Sherrod’s firing in haste, without knowing that the video clip, from a speech she gave to the N.A.A.C.P., had been taken out of context. He said that he had acted on his own, and that there was “no pressure from the White House.”
Mr. Vilsack’s late-afternoon appearance capped a humiliating and fast-paced few days not only for the White House, but also for the N.A.A.C.P. and the national news media, especially the Fox News Channel and its hosts Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, all of whom played a role in promoting the story about Ms. Sherrod.
The controversy illustrates the influence of right-wing Web sites like the one run by Andrew Breitbart, the blogger who initially posted the misleading and highly edited video, which he later said had been sent to him already edited. (Similarly, Mr. Breitbart used edited videos to go after Acorn, the community organizing group.) Politically charged stories often take root online before being shared with a much wider audience on Fox. The television coverage, in turn, puts pressure on other news media outlets to follow up.
The full video of Ms. Sherrod’s March speech to an N.A.A.C.P. gathering in Douglas, Ga., shows that it was a consciousness-raising story. Ms. Sherrod’s father was murdered in 1965 by white men who were never indicted; she spoke about how in response, she vowed to stay in the South and work for change. She married the Rev. Charles Sherrod, a civil rights leader and cofounder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
Later, as director of a nonprofit group in Georgia formed to help black farmers, long before she went to work for the Agriculture Department, Ms. Sherrod received a request to help a white farm couple, Roger and Eloise Spooner, and she confessed in the speech that the request had given her pause. She did help them, however, and as the fracas over her firing became public this week, the Spooners came to her defense, saying Ms. Sherrod had gone out of her way to accompany them to see a lawyer and, in effect, had helped them save their farm.
“If we hadn’t have found her, we would have lost everything, I’m afraid,” Mrs. Spooner, 82, said in a telephone interview.
Fox News began its pursuit of Ms. Sherrod in prime time on Monday night on three successive opinion shows that reached at least three million people. Leading off, Mr. O’Reilly asked on his top-rated program, “Is there racism in the Department of Agriculture?” He discussed the tape, plugged Mr. Breitbart’s Web site and demanded that Ms. Sherrod resign immediately.
By the time Mr. O’Reilly’s remarks, which were taped in the afternoon, were broadcast, Ms. Sherrod had indeed resigned, a development that Fox’s next host, Mr. Hannity, treated as breaking news at the beginning of his show. He played a short part of what he called the “shocking” video from Mr. Breitbart, and later discussed the development with a panel of guests, mentioning the N.A.A.C.P.’s recent accusations of racism within the conservative Tea Party movement.
“It is interesting they just lectured the Tea Party movement last week,” Mr. Hannity said, telegraphing a talking point that would come up repeatedly on other shows.
Fox’s 10 p.m. show also covered the resignation as breaking news. Ms. Sherrod later said Fox had not tried to contact her before running the video clip repeatedly on Monday. (A Fox spokeswoman said the O’Reilly program had contacted the Agriculture Department for comment. On Wednesday, Mr. O’Reilly said he owed Ms. Sherrod an apology “for not doing my homework.”)
By Tuesday, Ms. Sherrod’s forced resignation was the talk of cable television news, and it was becoming clear that the Breitbart video clip had been taken out of context. After seeing the full video, the N.A.A.C.P., which had initially applauded Ms. Sherrod’s resignation, had reversed itself, saying it had been “snookered” into believing she had been acting with racial bias.
Still, Mr. Vilsack stood his ground on Tuesday, insisting that the Agriculture Department had a “zero tolerance” policy for discrimination. The department has for years been embroiled in lawsuits over accusations of discrimination against black farmers, and Mr. Vilsack said he had been working hard to “turn the page on the sordid civil rights record as U.S.D.A.”
By Tuesday night, however, the White House had intervened, a senior official said, and sent word to the Agriculture Department that Mr. Vilsack needed to reconsider.
The official said President Obama had not spoken personally to Mr. Vilsack, but questions swirled around the White House on Wednesday over just how involved the president and his aides were.
Mr. Obama has shied from making race relations a major theme of his presidency, yet somehow racially charged controversies keep cropping up — as was the case last year, when the president said the Cambridge, Mass., police had “acted stupidly” in arresting a black Harvard University professor, Henry Louis Gates Jr. The upshot of that was the White House “beer summit,” in which Mr. Gates and the white arresting officer shared some cold beverages with Mr. Obama and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
In an interview Wednesday afternoon, shortly after Mr. Vilsack extended his public apology, the Rev. Jesse Jackson said Mr. Obama should hold another summit with Ms. Sherrod and the Spooners.
“In the end, it’s such a redemptive storybook ending,” said Mr. Jackson, who has known Charles Sherrod for decades. “I wish that Shirley Sherrod and the Spooner family could be invited to the White House and give them the credit that they’re due, because it is a great American story. A rural white family in Georgia and a black woman, overcoming years of segregation. It would be great if the president were to seize this moment.”
