I’ve caught bits and pieces of the Shirley Sherrod/Andrew Breitbart fiasco this week while on the road. It reminds me why I feel Barack Obama’s election is so important, so historic, that it really doesn’t matter what he accomplishes legislatively during his term. Barack will always have my support, and this country owes him a debt it can never repay.
The conservative, teabagger right of this country is a vicious, mean spirited, un-relenting group of knee jerk self righteous judgmentalists who never once consider all the facts or circumstances of a situation before passing their holier-than-thou decisions down on those who they think should be punished. The Shirley Sherrod situation perfectly demonstrates that tendency – a single clip of a video so perfectly fit their regressionist, rejectionist, Old South ante-bellum Strom Thurmond universe that the very next seconds of the video clip were unnecessary. They merely ran with the edit.
Much will be written and said about the media environment which then took over at warp speed, and the cowardly decisions made by people in power with almost no facts except the edited ones from a lunatic fringe internet racist shoved in their face every 5 minutes by their TV screen. The right wing noise machine is so powerful, so effective, relies on an audience so ignorant and so proud to be so, it can make any lie, ANY lie, into a weapon. But the real kernel of truth about America within this episode is about race in America, and about justice in America.
And without the election of Barack Obama, none of this would have been revealed to anyone. Barack Obama has brought out the absolute worst in our country’s absolute worst racists. They will not stop, they will get louder, and that is, frankly, a very good thing. We are seeing our country very differently, every single day, learning something new, something old, and hopefully, well-meaning Americans will learn from it all and change our country for the better.
That’s what Barack Obama’s election was all about, Charlie Brown.
[...] This one I wanted to put at my campaign site. [...]
I couldn’t agree more!
[...] Tim Russo writes: Much will be written and said about the media environment which then took over at warp speed, and the cowardly decisions made by people in power with almost no facts except the edited ones from a lunatic fringe internet racist shoved in their face every 5 minutes by their TV screen. The right wing noise machine is so powerful, so effective, relies on an audience so ignorant and so proud to be so, it can make any lie, ANY lie, into a weapon. But the real kernel of truth about America within this episode is about race in America, and about justice in America. [...]
Agreed Tim!