Wrong.
It's amazing how the folks using the "Tea Party" moniker are shaping political discourse in the US today -- and successfully distracting us from the important issues.
Today, what stories should be all over the media?
President Obama signed sweeping financial reform into law.
Secretary of State Clinton announced new sanctions against North Korea.
What IS all over the media?
Shirley Sherrod might not want her job back even if the White House offers it to her.
So the NAACP criticized the Tea Party folks for some of the "elements of racism" within their ranks. A couple of Tea Party folks got their noses out of joint and decided to "prove" that the NAACP was being hypocritical, because it was welcoming racists of its own.
Enter Andrew Breitbart, a conservative blogger who gets FAR more attention than his ideas merit. He posted a heavily edited video of a USDA regional coordinator giving a speech to the NAACP that made it seem as if she were admitting to discrimination against white farmers during her tenure at the USDA.
(Of course, what she REALLY said was that 24 years ago, when she worked for a non-profit, she had a brief period of thinking white poor people didn't need as much help as their black counterparts, and then she learned better and realized that poverty is color blind -- and she became committed to helping out poor people however she could. But that part was all cut out of the video, so people started making snap judgments about Sherrod based on a 2 1/2 minute out-of-context video clip.)
Without doing any homework (like viewing the whole 43 minute speech, or maybe asking some of their members who actually heard the speech, or *GASP* talking to Sherrod herself!), the NAACP condemned Sherrod -- and before long, she was on the phone with a deputy undersecretary of agriculture (who hadn't done any homework, either) telling her to pull over to the side of the road she was driving on and resign via her Blackberry.
So just because she was the highest-ranking NAACP-related person Breitbart could find a quick way to smear, Sherrod lost her job for being a racist -- and the tool used to oust her was her speech championing racial tolerance and equality.
How effed up is that?
I wouldn't blame Sherrod one bit if she told her former bosses to shove her job where the sun don't shine.
And in spite of the truth of this situation, there are STILL people all over the Internet saying Sherrod "deserved" to lose her job. Is it because they are stupid or willfully ignorant?
Today, what stories should be all over the media?
President Obama signed sweeping financial reform into law.
Secretary of State Clinton announced new sanctions against North Korea.
What IS all over the media?
Shirley Sherrod might not want her job back even if the White House offers it to her.
So the NAACP criticized the Tea Party folks for some of the "elements of racism" within their ranks. A couple of Tea Party folks got their noses out of joint and decided to "prove" that the NAACP was being hypocritical, because it was welcoming racists of its own.
Enter Andrew Breitbart, a conservative blogger who gets FAR more attention than his ideas merit. He posted a heavily edited video of a USDA regional coordinator giving a speech to the NAACP that made it seem as if she were admitting to discrimination against white farmers during her tenure at the USDA.
(Of course, what she REALLY said was that 24 years ago, when she worked for a non-profit, she had a brief period of thinking white poor people didn't need as much help as their black counterparts, and then she learned better and realized that poverty is color blind -- and she became committed to helping out poor people however she could. But that part was all cut out of the video, so people started making snap judgments about Sherrod based on a 2 1/2 minute out-of-context video clip.)
Without doing any homework (like viewing the whole 43 minute speech, or maybe asking some of their members who actually heard the speech, or *GASP* talking to Sherrod herself!), the NAACP condemned Sherrod -- and before long, she was on the phone with a deputy undersecretary of agriculture (who hadn't done any homework, either) telling her to pull over to the side of the road she was driving on and resign via her Blackberry.
So just because she was the highest-ranking NAACP-related person Breitbart could find a quick way to smear, Sherrod lost her job for being a racist -- and the tool used to oust her was her speech championing racial tolerance and equality.
How effed up is that?
I wouldn't blame Sherrod one bit if she told her former bosses to shove her job where the sun don't shine.
And in spite of the truth of this situation, there are STILL people all over the Internet saying Sherrod "deserved" to lose her job. Is it because they are stupid or willfully ignorant?
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