God-damn it, I am sick of this shit.
It show you how cynical I’ve gotten that when I heard of a supposedly racist story from Shirley Sherrod, my alarm bells went off. I assumed that we weren’t seeing the whole story.
God damn it, I hate being right all the time.
The wife of the white farmer allegedly discriminated against by the USDA’s rural development director for Georgia said Shirley Sherrod “kept us out of bankruptcy.”
Eloise Spooner, 82, awoke Tuesday to discover that Sherrod had lost her job after videotaped comments she made in March at a local NAACP banquet surfaced on the web.
Sherrod, who is black, told the crowd she didn’t do everything she could to help a white farmer whom she said was condescending when he came to her for aid.
“What he didn’t know while he was taking all that time trying to show me he was superior to me was, I was trying to decide just how much help I was going to give him,” Sherrod said in the video, recorded March 27 in Douglas in southeast Georgia.
But Spooner, who considers Sherrod a “friend for life,” said the federal official worked tirelessly to help the Iron City couple hold onto their land as they faced bankruptcy back in 1986.
Read the whole thing.
This is not the first time, this is not the second time, this is not the 871st time this has happened. Conservatives are constantly bombarded with the Outrage of the Day from right wing media whores who will saying anything, distort anything and never fact check if it gets them page views, viewers or listeners. Right now, we have this ridiculous controversy over the “ground zero mosque”, a small mosque in a larger building that is two blocks away from Ground Zero and has no view of it. And don’t even get me started on Climategate and global warming.
My skepticism over these dog whistle stories — skepticism that is proving again and again to be warranted — is born of my fundamental conservatism. When a story plays to my pre-conceived ideas, I question it. I’ve been fooled too many times to just jump in and start screaming. Blogging, incidentally, has stimulated my skepticism because if I get burned by a bad story, I get burned publicly.
One of the reasons I shied away from liberalism was precisely this sort of thing. In the 80’s and 90’s, liberals would distort stories or simply make them up to score political points. Mitch Snyder made up three million homeless, for example.
Conservatives, at that time, tended to stick a little closer to facts, the odd welfare queen hysteria not withstanding. This is no longer the case, it would seem.
This has to stop. Conservatives can not be taken seriously when they howl a the moon every time Andrew Breitbart of Matt Drudge or Sarah Palin say “werewolf”.
Update: Just to be clear: I’m not happy about what Sherrod said or apparently did. And I thought her speech kept circling back to the race question. My point here, however, is that no one bothered to dig up the entire story; they just screamed with outrage. The conservatives like to play the “if it happened to us” game all the time. If a conservative told a story about overcoming bigotry, would they be denounced like this?
Update: The NAACP has the full video and has apologized for supporting Sherrod’s resignation. Apparently, she was talking about overcoming racism in the context of USDA’s ongoing efforts to settle past discrimination.
The NAACP are showing a lot of class here. The thing for conservatives to do now is to admit they were snookered and participated in a smear job.
Update: Kudos to the conservatives admitting Sherrod was wronged. Here’s Allahpundit. Krauthammer has come out on her side as has … holy shit, Glenn Beck?!