could they have effed this whole situation up more badly?

::ponders::

No, not really. Governing administration of one of the world's superpowers flinching at, fleeing from and sacking a dedicated civil servant over a 2-minute video mendaciously edited by a Drudge protege who'd pulled exactly this kind of shit before? Short of sending Vilsack out to break her kneecaps in person, I can't think how they could have effed it up any worse.

USDA chief makes "profound" apology to ex-employee Shirley Sherrod, offers her a job working on civil rights.

Maybe this will wake some people up about blinding striking out any time the lunatic fringe starts making a stink about something?

Man, I heard that story on NPR yesterday, and it gobsmacked me. She got fired because of an out-of-context tiny snippet of a video from a speech she made almost 20 years ago, in a different job? You're damn right she deserves a "profound" apology as well as her job back as well as gold-plated hookers and cocaine. Or her drug of choice.

She was speaking at an NAACP event and told a story about how, after some ugly events in her own past, including a relative being lynched, she was initially reluctant when she joined the USDA and realized that she was being asked to help white farmers keep their land, but how she ended up having her eyes opened to her own biases and completely revising her approach/perspective.

The part of the video flogged by Breitbart was " reluctant when she joined the USDA and realized that she was being asked to help white farmers. "

Cue denuciations from the NAACP, firing by the USDA, much weeping and rending of clothes on Fox.

TNC (and lots of others) have the full video up now. Well worth watching.

Long story semi-short, Gud, a Matt Drudgealike named Andrew Breitbart posted a short video a couple of days ago of a Georgia USDA official named Shirley Sherrod giving a keynote speech at a local NAACP chapter back in March. He selected and highlighted a couple of sentences from her 40-minute talk to make it look like she was bragging to the NAACP about being racist against whites and deliberately failing to help a white farmer and his wife save their farm, while the audience cheered her on.

She alerted her higher-ups to the video, explained the context, asked folks to be on the alert and to contact her and the NAACP chapter for clarification, and then heard nothing until, I think, yesterday morning, when she was on the road between two Georgia cities and got three calls from USDA higher ups telling her the White House wanted her to resign; on the third call, the caller ordered her to pull over to the side of the freeway and submit her resignation immediately in writing via her Blackberry.

Agriculture Secretary Vilsack defended the firing on grounds of her awful racism against whites. The NAACP president condemned her awful racism against whites. She went on CNN to defend herself, the victimized farmer and his wife popped up to say that she had in fact saved their farm (Interviewer: What would you do to her if she were here right now? Wife: Oh, give her some love!), and the NAACP finally tracked down the full tape of the entire 40-minute speech, which revealed...

...first, that the incident Sherrod talked about had happened 24 years ago when she was working for a private, non-government group, and, second, that in those two sentences she'd been talking about a twinge of prejudice she'd felt on first meeting the couple, and gone on to talk about overcoming that, getting to know them and their case, working hard to save their farm, and re-committing herself to working even harder to defend all the poor of Georgia no matter their color.

The NAACP apologized to Sherrod. Vilsack defended her firing, saying that even if she wasn't racist, her having been previously attacked by the Drudgealike and then fired meant that all her actions and decisions would now be second-guessed and she'd be ineffective. The White House backed up Vilsack. Then the White House told him to reconsider. He shut up for many hours, Rachel Maddow did an in-depth report on the whole mess, Sherrod said she might not want her job back anyway considering how she'd been treated, and at least now she'd have some free time to hang out with that couple on their farm because she was long overdue for a visit, and now Vilsack has re-offered her some kind of job.

Brenda's summary is excellent and doesn't require me following any links to sites I don't like to give clicks to (which is the first bunch of results I was finding while trying to find the exact quote)*. Paul Krugman's most excellent analogy for the whole story was

It was basically as if I said, “Some people say that violence is always the answer; they’re wrong”, Fox ran with the story “Krugman says violence is always the answer”, and the Times fired me.

* today's wire stories seem to be doing that thing they do where they say "after yesterday's horribly damning video!!!!" and then don't actually do a better job of giving the context in a story that's all about not giving the proper context. And then they all copy each other. Oh, the irony.

A right-wing blogger ran two minutes from a speech by the USDA Georgia director of farm aid, in which she said that 24 years ago, while working for a farmer advocacy group that focused on black farmers, was asked for help for by a white farmer and her first reaction was not to put the "full force" of what she could do behind him. The actual import of the speech was that working with him over the next two years showed her that she too was racist and that the real issue was not race, but poverty. The whole speech was an impassioned plea for more cooperation between races. Her transformation was particularly remarkable in that her father was killed by a white man for racial reasons, a white man who was never charged, and that led her to active participation in the civil rights movement in South Georgia.

I thought the fact that the NAACP immediately threw her under the bus was even more despicable than the Dems.

She was speaking at an NAACP event and told a story about how, after some ugly events in her own past, including a relative being lynched, she was initially reluctant when she joined the USDA and realized that she was being asked to help white farmers keep their land, but how she ended up having her eyes opened to her own biases and completely revising her approach/perspective.

Not exactly. Her father was murdered by the KKK, and she wasn't with the USDA at the time she was speaking of. She was working at a non-profit that helped black farmers. In fact, working against some of the USDA's more racist policies.

The whole speech makes a sort of beautiful "turn from the dark side" metaphor that the fact that this evil, racist fuck used it against her should make anyone with a shred of decency recoil in horror, Republican or Democrat, conservative or liberal.

I had only read about it on Fox news, I suppose I shouldn't be surprised I didn't get the whole story.

I swear the Obama administration seems to want to go out of their way to appease the right wing for reasons that totally escape me. Gonna hate you no matter what you do, I don't think that's news.

Because we live in an age where calling bullshit, bullshit is the height of incivility.

Ginger, yes, that's the latest. See also Van Jones, ACORN, and reacting instead of leading on a million different things. Healthcare, welfare, patriot act, gay marriage, abortion... I stand by my vote for Obama, but I am becoming increasingly disillusioned and despondant. I know it's a hard job, but I think he's missed some key opportunities to shift our national debate. And race is one of those big areas.

I'm just tired.