Don't Call Me Shirley

What’s worse than being awake for 24 consecutive hours?  I don’t know.  What was the question again?

The well is capped.  Bet you never thought you’d hear those words, huh.  Almost three months after the initial explosion, British Petroleum has finally fitted its blown-out well with a containment cap, effectively sealing off the well.  At some point within the next week, BP will attempt to permanently seal the well bore with concrete via the relief wells.  They will then be able to turn their full attention to cleaning beaches, paying claims and bickering about how much money they owe the country in compensation.  Of course there is the small matter of an accurate well flow measurement.  Part of the purpose of getting this new cap in place was supposedly to finally get a precise measurement of the flow of oil.  Once the flow could be accurately determined, the government could figure out exactly how much money BP would have to pay in compensation.  But once the well was capped, and the spill cam showed nothing but blue water, The oil company had no interest in reopening it to collect the oil, and the government certainly didn’t want to be the one responsible for plumes of oil and methane gas reappearing on the spill cam.  While the physical spill may now be over, the legal battles have yet to begin.

Goldman Sachs announced early this week a quarterly profit of $250 million.  This was, of course, less than “analysts” expected, and therefore drove the stock price down a little bit.  But that $250 million profit was the change left over AFTER Goldman Sachs made a one-time pay-out of almost $1.2 billion in fines to the federal government.  At a time when 9.6 percent of Americans are desperate for work, Goldman Sachs is making half-a-billion dollars EVERY MONTH gambling with their futures.  I guess it’s good to be the king.

Overshadowed by another event I will get to later, President Obama signed the financial reform bill into law this past Wednesday, almost two years after the financial collapse.  The bill is significantly weaker than it had been only several weeks ago, due in part to the deft legislative maneuvering of one Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown, and for reasons yet to adequately be explained by anyone, does not cover loans made by automobile dealers (often some of the worst offenders when it comes to predatory lending), but it is a significant improvement over what he had in place two years ago.  Will it prevent another financial crisis?  Probably not.  The financial industry is pretty good at evading whatever rules are created to restrain them.  But it should prevent the taxpayers from having to shoulder the burden of the industry’s poor decisions.  It should also prevent many bad decisions from being kept secret.  To repeat an overused cliche, sunlight is the best disinfectant, and the fact that all complex financial transactions will now be required to take place on public exchanges will afford market-watchers an opportunity to spot disturbing trends and bubbles before they become large enough to take down the economy.  Of course, there is no shortage of people willing to do stupid things in full view of others, NBC’s entire prime time lineup is a testament to that fact.  But at least now we will be able to point, laugh and escort them away before their stupidity infects/affects the rest of us.

Last week at it’s annual meeting, the NAACP issued a resolution calling on the Tea Party movement to denounce any chapters or members perpetuating racist opinions or ideology.  Of course, any moron could see the resolution was doomed to fail before it was even drafted.  Tea drinkers have no respect for the NAACP or its resolutions.  The only thing that could happen, did happen, as the Tea Party movement took offense to being called racists (even though the movement was not called racist) and accused the NAACP of being the real racists.  Everything was proceeding as scripted until one Mark Williams, spokesman for the bus-riding, flag-waving Glen Beck idolizing Tea Party Express outfit decided to try his hand at comedy.  Williams wrote what he claimed was a “satirical” letter to President Lincoln in the “voice” of the NAACP.  In his “satire,” Williams ran the whole gamut of racial stereotypes, from laziness and welfare dependance to “things really were better under slavery,” unmasking himself more efficiently and more effectively than the NAACP ever could have.  His blatantly offensive rant was too much for the rest of the national movement, who issued a statement saying that neither Mark Williams nor the Tea Party Express was welcome in the movement any longer.

I relayed that story to provide the context for this one.  Some on the right were not happy with the NAACPs proxy takedown of Mark Williams.  Count among them influential conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart. Like many in the conservative echo chamber, Breitbart loathes the civil rights establishment, the current administration, democrats, liberals and any media outlets not beginning with the word “fox” and ending with the word “news.”  So, this past Tuesday, when someone sent him a “scandalous” edited, un-vetted two minute clip of a forty-plus minute address at an NAACP meeting earlier this year, he did the only thing he could do.  He published it to his blog.  In the edited version of the clip, Shirley Sherrod, a black woman employed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture as head of Rural Development in Georgia is speaking about how a white farmer who came to her for help in saving his farm.  She states that she did not “give the full force of what (she) could do” to help said white farmer save his farm.  At that point, the clip ends.  Eager to validate claims of the Tea Party and the rest of the echo chamber who had countercharged the NAACP with racism, Breitbart posted the video, claiming liberals and the “mainstream media” was covering up the true racist nature of the NAACP and the Obama administration.  Fox News immediately ran with the story, and merely hours later, Shirley Sherrod had been fired by the U.S.D.A., denounced by the NAACP and the clip was making the rounds on cable and network television news.

Fortunately, somebody remembered how actual journalism used to work in this country and started asking questions.  People began standing up for Sherrod, including the white farmer in the story.  The local chapter of the NAACP Sherrod was speaking at dug up the entire, unedited tape and released it to first the national organization, then to the rest of the media.  Turns out that what Sherrod was actually doing on that video tape was telling her own redemption story.  Early in 1965, when she was 17-years-old, Shirley Sherrod’s father was shot and killed by a white farmer in a dispute over several cows.  An all-white grand jury brought no charges against the shooter.  That summer when she went to register to vote at the courthouse, she was denied that right by the local white establishment.  After earning her masters degree she returned to rural Georgia to help minority farmers retain their land, and has been doing so for the past forty years.  During the late 80's, the white farmer mentioned in the video came to her for help.  And at first, as she said in the edited clip, she did not do everything she could to help him.  She sent him to get help from “one of his own.”  What Breitbart’s clip excluded, of course, was the most important part of the story.  Sherrod ran into that farmer again, not long after she had sent to a white lawyer for help, and found that the lawyer had done nothing for him.  Realizing that this white farmer was in much the same boat as many of the black farmers she had devoted her life to representing, she then did everything she could - going above and beyond the call of duty by some accounts - to help that man save his farm.  She and that farmer have since become friends, and Shirley Sherrod has expanded her life’s work and embraced the idea that white farmers, as well as black farmers and poor farmers of every persuasion are valuable and deserve to be treated as such.

But for about 12 hours, nobody knew any of that.  Why?  Nobody bothered to look for it.  They saw a “gotcha” moment and seized upon it.  Once they discovered they’d been had, hoodwinked, bamboozled by a blogger and activist by the name of Andrew Breitbart, there were plenty of red faces and stammering apologies, from the Secretary of Agriculture to the head of the NAACP to the network news anchors.  Talking heads from across the spectrum were demanding an explanation from Breitbart, and the return of Sherrod to her previous position.  Even Charles Krauthammer and Glen Beck implored the U.S.D.A. to apologize and reinstate Sherrod.  Seriously.  If Glen Beck thinks you’ve unfairly maligned someone not named Palin, you have REALLY screwed something up.  To their credit, Secretary Vilsack called Sherrod to apologize and offered her a promotion.  Breitbart, on the other hand, insisted on taking the low road.  At first he questioned the legitimacy of the unedited version of the tape turned over by the NAACP.  Then he claimed the farmer’s wife who came to Sherrod’s aide was a plant, and demanded to know what kind of research went into determining if she was indeed, the actual wife of the person mentioned on the video.  Then he claimed he never maligned Sherrod, and that this whole episode was a media distortion of the point he was trying to make.  He rounded out his discreditation by admitting he eagerly published a piece of video given to him by an anonymous source he knew nothing about, did nothing to verify it’s authenticity, didn’t know that the incident referred to in the clip happened 24 years ago, and really didn’t care that the point of the full story was the EXACT OPPOSITE of what his two minute clip lead people to believe.

Is the Department of Agriculture hypersensitive to issues of race?  Yes.  They have good reason to be.  They have quite the checked track record when it comes to such issues.  Did that hypersensitivity lead to the premature firing of Shirley Sherrod?  You bet.  Is this administration hypersensitive to issues of race - particularly reverse discrimination?  Uh huh.  Do they have good reason to be?  Sure.  Should they have waited for more facts before involving themselves at all?  Of course.  Lost in all of this (in addition to the signing of the financial reform bill) is the disgusting, shameful, absolute failure of the media to perform it’s basic function; provide the public with accurate, vetted information.  A popular conservative blogger posted a clip purporting to demonstrate reverse racism and accused the “media” of covering it up and refusing to report on it due to their “liberal bias.”  Not wanting to appear irrelevant in the face of the Internet, and super-ultra-mega-sensitive to any charge of “bias,” regardless of who the accuser is, the rest of the cable-verse picked up the story and ran with it.

Once upon a time, in the good old days, somebody would have maybe called Shirley Sherrod, or the white farmer for comment, BEFORE plastering the clip all over the six o’clock news.  Or perhaps called the NAACP and requested the full tape the clip was taken from.  Somebody might have tried to verify and corroborate the hysterical blather of an internet rabble-rouser before going to print with the story.  But those were the good old days.  That was the old media.  This is the future.  New and improved.  Where reputations are made by ruining people’s lives with lies and baseless accusations.  And no apologies or retractions are made for supermarket tabloid behavior.  Instead of issuing a mea culpa once they realized they’d been taken for a ride, the media immediately pivoted to accusing the administration of being too quick to jump into action without sufficient evidence.  It’s called displacement.  When my dog gets upset and can’t bite me, she attacks her brother instead.  Sadly, cable news has been reduced to a pack of dogs fighting over scraps.  Several years ago, Dan Rather ran a story featuring false documents relating to then president Bush.  Dan Rather was fired from CBS.  Who’s going to fire Andrew Breitbart from the Internet?

Race has always been a difficult subject for this country. No one likes to be discriminated against due to the color of their skin. And no one likes to be accused of discriminating against people due to the color of their skin. So, victims have developed organizations to protect them from discrimination. And the perpetrators have developed subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) ways of discriminating. Especially when politics are involved. The tactic of choice currently seems to be reverse discrimination. I’m sure you’ve heard the theories. Healthcare reform is really just “reparations” to black people. Tax increases are a plot to steal money from hard-working white people to give handouts to lazy minorities. Refusing to prevent a group of New York City Muslims from for exercising their Constitutional right to freedom of worship is an attack on American values. The boogeyman of the moment is the New Black Panther Party. Yes, Lee Atwater is alive, and his name is Megyn Kelly. For weeks now, the Fox News daytime anchor has devoted an enormous amount of time to the case of two members of the New Black Panther Party arrested in Pennsylvania during the 2008 election on charges of voter intimidation. According to police reports and video recordings, the men were picked up outside a Philadelphia polling station, dressed in black and pacing back and forth, one of them brandishing a nightstick. Recently the Justice Department dropped most of the charges against the men, as there was no evidence anyone was denied entry to the polling station, or was dissuaded from entering due to their presence. But according to Kelly, these men, and the group to which they belong, are the second coming of the Ku Klux Klan, trolling the back roads of American cities in search of poor, unsuspecting white people to lynch. While it is easy to to unequivocally identify the New Black Panthers as a “hate group,” to compare them to the Klan is laughable. The Panther’s membership is limited to MAYBE a few hundred people, and their political actions have amounted to disrupting school board meetings and verbally assaulting Jews and Michelle Malkin. In comparison, the Klan boasted upwards of four million members at its peak, (about ten thousand now), has a long and sordid history of intimidation, abuse and murder. But, like Andrews Breitbart, the facts don’t matter all that much to Megyn Kelly. What matters is the narrative. Kelly understands that there is no image more frightening to white America, than a dark-skinned man with a weapon. And the image is all the more effective when painted daily by an attractive platinum blonde working for the “most trusted name in news.”