Shirley Sherrod, who lost her job at the USDA over a heavily edited video clip of her speech at an NAACP event from 24 years ago is getting ready to sue Andrew Breitbart, the dim bulb that posted the devilishly hacked up video on his website.
My feeling is that Breitbart, in his zeal to shoot one back at the NAACP for its manifesto issued to the TEA Party to remove racists and racism from their numbers and from their rhetoric, over objectivized Ms. Sherrod. He didn’t see Shirley Sherrod as a person, and whether that is a racist tendency I will leave to you, he merely saw an opportunity to paint the NAACP in ways that whites fear the most: that blacks are out to get them.
That the message that Ms. Sherrod actually delivered, one that had quite the opposite meaning than Breitbart was willing to give her credit for, actually makes his heinous act worse.
But to get back to my main point, perhaps this is valuable a lesson for Andrew Breitbart and others of his ilk. That when you seek to bend and twist the words of another, it’s one thing to make your political point, which is what I think was Breitbart’s full intention. But when the result causes a person to lose their livelihood and to be, for a brief time, vilified not only in the press but also by the very group she supported for all those many years, that takes the whole thing to a new level.
People commit fraud in the name of making a political point all the time. It is a huge game. Where it stops being a game is when it starts affecting the good name and the livelihood of another living breathing person.
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