'A disservice was done' by Andrew Breitbart

There are no innocents in the Shirley Sherrod mess. You have an administration that pushed her to resign without due process. You have a civil rights organization that condemned her without hearing her side of the story. And you have a news media that failed to ask the most basic journalism 101 questions that could have spared everyone the last 36 hours or so of grief. But this is a controversy based on a lie. A lie disseminated by Andrew Breitbart, who says that he was trying to point out the hypocrisy of the NAACP and stubbornly stands by his reprehensible action despite being proved wrong.

Last week, the civil rights organization passed a resolution calling on the leaders of the Tea Party movement to disavow the racist elements within it. Breitbart says the point of posting a small portion of Sherrod’s speech to an NAACP chapter in March was to show the hypocrisy of the NAACP tolerating racism within its own organization. “I have evidence that shows, based upon [the NAACP’s] standards, that shows people in the audience behaving racist,” Breitbart told Mara Schiavocampo of NBC News. “We have an NAACP-sanctioned event in which the speaker is talking in a racist narrative, in which the audience, when she refers a white farmer to a white lawyer... and when she talks about not giving him the full weight of what she could do with her position, the audience cheers in this video. That to me is the standard of showing that racism existed in that room.”

Except it didn’t. And after watching her entire 43-minute speech, to say that racism did exist in that room is to believe that Rodney King really was lunging at cops while on the receiving end of a beat-down from the LAPD. The cheers were loudest when Sherrod spoke of getting beyond race.

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apparently this racist jerk breitbart cut the recording just seconds before sherrod got to the part that clears up the misunderstanding breitbart foisted on his audience.

unfortunately he succeeded in panicking both the government and the naacp into circling the wagons. the right's relentless attacks must be making them feel besieged.