Video – Anatomy of a smear campaign
CNN’s Randi Kaye does a pretty good job of breaking down the timeline in this unfortunate Shirley Sherrod debacle. Calling it a “smear campaign” isn’t accurate, however. This was a complete and utter clusterfuck from start to finish.
- Andrew Breitbart doesn’t deserve his bully pulpit. He’s not a journalist, he’s just a rabble-rouser with a Web site, not even a yellow journalist, just a scumbag who learned his stock and trade from Matt Drudge. A total sleazeball and a pig. He fully admits that he did this not to hurt Sherrod but to stir up shit with the NAACP. She was just collateral damage.
- Fox News should have done a minimum of journalist fact-checking on this before they ran the story. They didn’t. Not that it surprises me that once again, they don’t even come close to “fair and balanced.”
(Rich Siegel points out that most other news outlets pretty much sat back and watched this one from the sidelines until the damage was done, too.)
- Don’t even get me started on Benjamin Jealous and the NAACP. Jealous is a lousy public spokesperson, if his stammering, amateuring and jejune defense of the NAACP’s Tea Party resolution on last weekend’s “Face the Nation” and his defense of the organization in the wake of this event are any indications.
What’s even more revolting, the NAACP plays the victim card by suggesting they were “snookered” by Fox News and Breitbart – they’re big boys and girls, they should have done their homework. Hell, Sherrod’s talk happened at one of their own events. At the very least, they should have watched their own tapes or talked to their own people who were at the event, or maybe, I dunno, called Shirley Sherrod to better understand the context of her comments.
- Tom Vilsack and the Obama administration should have reviewed the facts before they decided on a course of action. They didn’t.
At best, Vilsack displays horrible managerial judgment here. At worst, this sends up a red flag against anyone who is considering a career in public service – yes, a 25 year old sound bite taken out of context can ruin your life if someone has a political axe to grind, not even with you, but with the organization with whom you’ve spoken.
For Obama’s opponents, especially GOP and Tea Party strategists, it demonstrates a huge chink in the administration’s armor – they wildly overreacted simply to the inference that a person of color within their organization may harbor racist tendencies, and rather than actually proceed thoughtfully, carefully and cogently – everything we’ve been told is supposed to be a hallmark of this particular commander in chief – we saw them only too happy to throw an ally under the bus to make the problem go away.
To summarize, I’m disgusted by the whole thing from start to finish.