Federalist Paupers

Claiming Scalps

It looks like Shirley Sherrod has gotten a genuinely bum deal. I’m sorry for her, and I wish her the best going forward.

Erick Erickson (whose name always makes me snicker) has some thoughts on this:

. . . Andrew Breitbart promised he would do to the left what the left has been doing to the right for years. He is gathering quite the collection of leftwing scalps and will forever warm the hearts of the right for the ACORN takedown alone. I’m glad he is on our side.

That said, I think Shirley Sherrod has been unfairly characterized as a racist. . . .

The left has used race as a weapon for a very long time. They have devalued what racism means – which is a terrible shame if you actually care about stopping real racism or remembering it in our history. The word now connotes disagreeing with the left instead of what it actually means.

Had Ms. Sherrod been white, she’d be vilified in the press, fired, and probably have trouble thereafter seeking work. The NAACP would be passing a resolution condemning the Department of Agriculture as racist. This is what we have become in politics because of the unrepentant race-baiting on the left. It has become a tit for tat war of retribution.

We see that on the Journolist as reported by the Daily Caller today. When Jeremiah Wright was in the news, the leftwing reporters on Journolist plotted to change the subject by declaring various figures in and around the Bush White House, including Karl Rove on the inside and Fred Barnes on the outside, “racist.” They wanted to scream racism not because the people to be attacked were in fact racist, but because it would be a useful way to change the subject.

That war has casualties on both sides. Ms. Sherrod is the latest. It is not fair. But that’s how the left plays and the right must fight on offense or not fight at all. It disgusts me to have to say it, but that is so very sadly where we are. As long as the left gets a pass on this all too easy game, the right has to fight back.

Ultimately, I’m with Erickson. Too many people I respect have been unjustifiably labeled racist for me to shed more than a couple of tears for Ms. Sherrod. The aim at this point is to make the Racist War so mutually damaging that we all agree to ignore it. This can’t end until the race hucksters and shamsters pack up and go home.

Posted by Apollo in Race

15 Comments »

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 21st, 2010 at 1:46 am and is filed under Race. You can follow any responses to this entry through the comments RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

15 Responses to “Claiming Scalps”

Jeff says:

It sucks that she got railroaded, and it really does say a lot about just how fucked race is in this country when so many people don’t even bother to listen to what a person is saying before jumping to conclusions. But it’s also a little funny that Sherrod decided to engage in calling Obamacare opponents “racist” in this same speech only to be hoisted by her own petard.

I do think Breitbart’s point about the audience cheering on her racist statements is well taken. They didn’t seem nearly as enthused when she got to the moral of her story. It’s all a rather roundabout way to prove the NAACP’s double standard on this issue, though, when one can simply point out that they’ve honored the likes of Jeremiah Wright and Louis Farrakhan by allowing them to take to the podium at NAACP events.

July 21st, 2010 at 12:29 pm

Jamie says:

The fact that the entire story is complete bunk doesn’t matter?

Bull, we’re better than that. I’m with the Reverend on this one. Content of character, not color of skin.

July 21st, 2010 at 2:42 pm

Apollo says:

We can’t focus on the former until we stop focusing on the latter. The best way to do that is to let those who profit from continuing racial discord (i.e. NAACP) know that everybody, including them, can have their thoughts and words twisted to sound like a racist. We’ll inflict some empathy on them, and lessen the utility of their primary weapon (i.e. twisting people’s words to make them sound like a racist).

And, as Jeff pointed out, the story isn’t complete bunk. The woman’s speech is in front of an NAACP crowd, and they seem much more enthused by the part of her story where she stuck it to whitey than by the part of her story where she followed the Reverend’s advice. This woman doesn’t seem to be a racist, but the response to her story tells me that many in her audience are.

July 21st, 2010 at 3:48 pm

Jamie says:

I’m sorry, Apollo, but lying is not the way to win this fight.

July 22nd, 2010 at 8:33 am

Tom says:

We can’t focus on the former until we stop focusing on the latter.

I’m all for sticking it to the race-baiters at the NAACP and using their own tactics against them, but not this poor lady. This is the race equivalent of saying “shit happens” upon discovering that the terrorist gathering we just bombed was actually a wedding.

July 22nd, 2010 at 8:55 am

Jeff says:

I’m not sure that’s entirely accurate, Tom. Sherrod got shafted, no doubt, but in this very same speech she accused Republicans (and Obamacare opponents in general) of being motivated by racism. Also, she has blamed Fox News for her being fired (which is bogus, since Fox didn’t even report the story until after she resigned) and has made some really incendiary comments about how the people at Fox want to take us back to the days when black people didn’t dare look white people in the face. So she is proving to be something of a race-baiter herself.

July 22nd, 2010 at 10:01 am

FormerSwingVoter says:

Conservative media gets caught in blatant lie. At fault: liberals! Also, she must have deserved it for other reasons. Or because of the audience’s reaction. Or for things the NAACP did. Whichever sounds most plausible to whoever I’m saying it to, really.

July 22nd, 2010 at 10:13 am

Jamie says:

Given what was done to her I don’t really blame her for being a little pissed off.

July 22nd, 2010 at 10:13 am

Jeff says:

Andrew Breitbart posts an edited video. At fault: Fox News! Because the Obama administration had to fire Sherrod before FNC could tar him with the story. And we know they would have, too, even though they didn’t. Also, their reportage has only been so generally sympathetic to Sherrod because they hate Obama so much. Those racists.

July 22nd, 2010 at 10:56 am

FormerSwingVoter says:

Yeah, because the Fox News Website and Fox Nation (both posted early in the afternoon, hours before her resignation) are clearly unrelated to the Fox News Channel.

Also, those who were only slandering her after her resignation were completely justified because of… um… reasons! O’Reilly, who clearly recorded his show beforehand (he was demanding her resignation) would not have been so sure of himself if the forced resignation he didn’t know happened hadn’t already happened. Or something.

That’s okay, though. I’m sure this was a one-time issue, and everything else you hear from these sources is completely 100% true.

July 22nd, 2010 at 12:17 pm

Jeff says:

I don’t see a timestamp on either story, nor do I see where they reported anything that was false, let alone something that would amount to a blatant lie.

The blame here lies entirely with the Obama administration (specifically Vilsack, since he’s either responsible or willing fall on his sword for the White House) for rushing to judgment and firing Sherrod without taking the time to even watch the video. For Christ’s sake, even the scandalous Breitbart video shows her saying that she later realized it wasn’t about black and white… and then, strangely, saying that it _is_ about black and white immediately after that. She should be immediately rehired and then promptly fired again, this time on the basis of her making out like it’s a good thing that federal employees are basically accountable to no one.

July 22nd, 2010 at 12:33 pm

Apollo says:

FSV,

This stopped being a story about journalism when orders came directly from the White House to fire a minor bureaucrat – someone who does not serve at the president’s pleasure but who can only be fired for cause – because of a few minutes of edited video on the internet. As Jim Gehraty pointed out this morning, this is “the administration that took three days to issue a presidential statement on an attempted bombing of a plane over Detroit, ten days to publicly comment on the oil spill in the Gulf, three months to review the policy in Afghanistan, and fourteen months to respond to a request from governors for U.S. troops on the southern border.” Yet this woman was called in her car a few hours after the video was released and told to pull over and type a letter of resignation on her Blackberry.

I remember not too long ago Democrats decrying the onset of Imperial Rule because a Republican president fired a few U.S. Attorneys – who are appointed directly by the president and serve only at his pleasure – because he thought they were not implementing his policies. Now we have orders coming directly from the White House to fire a career bureaucrat, without a moment’s investigation, exclusively to cover the White House’s ass politically.

Al Gonzalez and I await the Congressional hearings and threats of criminal prosecution.

July 22nd, 2010 at 2:11 pm

Jamie says:

Pretty much this:

http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NThkYjE2MzA1N2EyMzhiYzlkOTM0OGUzNTUxMGVmNjk=

July 22nd, 2010 at 5:55 pm

Conor Friedersdorf says:

Apollo, It’s probably a bad idea to allow race-baiting liberals to fundamentally alter your moral compass and principles you’ve long championed, at times as eloquently as anyone I’ve ever read.

July 23rd, 2010 at 3:08 am

Apollo says:

Conor,

I thank you for the compliment, but I’m not sure I’m being altered here. My moral compass still points toward a society with no racial discrimination, and my principles still demand an end to race-baiting. At most, I’ve come to a realization that my preferred tactic of addressing race-baiting intellectually is not going to be successful.

If you recall, I predicted that left-wing race-baiting would ramp up under a President Obama, not decline as you predicted. I have been proven correct on this, as the healthcare debate, the Congressional Black Caucus N-word smear, the Cambridge cop, the NAACP’s Tea Party vote, the general “Tea Partiers are racist” meme that is circulated widely, and the reaction to the Arizona immigration law illustrate. There are entrenched forces (CBC, NAACP, Obama administration) who have interests (both financial and ideological) in continuing in race-baiting, and who do not envision a country without racial discrimination but instead want our government and our elite institutions to discriminate solely on the basis of skin color into the distant future. Continuing to take racial insults does not help our cause but instead helps theirs by perpetuating a belief, especially among blacks, that racism is a dominant force in America today.

Fighting back on their terms and destroying their primary weapon against us is, I believe, the way to achieve our ends. We need to show that if everyone were held to the standards of speech that conservatives are held to, most people can quite easily be called racists. We need to illustrate that there is a fairly widespread us-vs-them mentality in the black community that is lethal poison to a color-blind society, and that we will no more tolerate racism and racial discord from non-whites than we tolerate it from whites. And we need to show that we care enough about ending racial discord that we’re willing to call people to the mat over it.

Occasionally, that means that we’ll call people to the mat who ought not have been called. We should obviously try to minimize this and apologize when it happens. But when we get to the point where 1 leftist is unjustifiably called out on race for every 10 conservatives who are, then I’ll get my panties in a wad about my side’s moral fiber. We’re a long way from that threshold.

July 23rd, 2010 at 12:48 pm

Blogroll

News

Only For Fun

Claiming Scalps

15 Responses to “Claiming Scalps”

Leave a Reply