Tuesday, July 20, 2010

About that racist USDA worker...

Hell, I do live in a cave. And even I've heard the story, and repeatedly been offered the video, of Shirley Sharrod speaking before an NAACP meeting and apparently crowing about the way she dissed a white farmer who came to her for help. It's been all over the conservative sites as proof of the racism of the Obama regime.

How 'bout that - turns out conservatives can twist a story, too! Who woulda guessed?

As it turns out, now that Ms. Sharrod has been forced to resign, that wasn't the whole story. It seems the video was rather severely edited.
  • The incident happened in 1986, long before she worked at USDA.
  • She worked for something called the Federation of Southern Cooperatives Land Assistance Fund, a private organization principally involved with helping black locals hang onto their land. Which is why it made a difference that this particular guy was white.
  • She did in fact help the white guy keep his land. His wife is her outspoken friend to this day.
  • She says that in the portions of the speech not included in the video, she told the story to show how she awakened to the fact that her job should be about helping people, not about helping people of a particular race. She wasn't crowing about sticking it to a white guy.
So, basically, telling a portion of a true story is a good way to turn it into a lie. Where have we seen this before? It seems so familiar.

Hm. You mean political people lie, not just liberal political people? What a revelation!

H/T to Balko.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Well, yeah, of course conservatives distort the truth (lie). And I did see that there was allegedly more to the story, and maybe there is, it sure wouldn't surprise me .......

But it was the *white house* that fired her. If this allegation is not true, then why didn't the administration support her? Political expediency?

Who is the racist/evil one here? The person who cherry picks pieces of a video to smear a woman as a racist (and by extension the administration that hired her), or the administration, who knowing the truth, fired her anyway (perhaps because they cannot tolerate any more hints that *they* might be racist)?

Answer, they both are.

So your point is well taken....political people of ALL stripes lie....

Anonymous said...

Yes, the right can and does occasionally spin, lie, or distort. And it’s as wrong as when the left does it. When the right blows smoke, it’s usually ham-handed and amateurish, easily spotted and just as easily rebutted. Then, almost without fail, the right turns and eats its own. The offenders are vilified with the same sort of vigor usually reserved for commies and fags.

Ahhh, but when the left does it at a rate exponentially more frequent, it has the full complicity of the main stream media, AND in the infrequent event of backfire or blowup…the left circles the wagons and defends its own.

Imagine if a white USDA exec told such a story, even as evidence of his subsequent redemption, he would be excoriated from sunup to sundown, 365/7, by BOTH sides of the spectrum. Give it a week and this woman will be made out to be a hero.

CorbinKale said...

In dealing with people of varying intellects and equally varied integrity, I struggled with the exact definition of a lie. I, finally, came up with the following:

A lie is action, or inaction, with the intent to deceive.

Example- If I put the keys on the table, then you ask me where the keys are, I would say they are on the table. When you look on the table, the keys are not there. Did I lie? No, I made an inaccurate statement, because I did not know that someone else had moved them. There was no intent to deceive, as I believed them to still be there.

However, if I KNEW that someone else had moved them and, when asked for the keys, only told you that, "I put them on the table." Did I lie? Yes, because I knew they weren't there. While I made an accurate statement, because I did, indeed, put them on the table, my intent was to deceive you about their location, therefore, it is a lie.

suek said...

Breitbart was on Hannity last night. His comments were interesting. He said the point of publishing the video was _not_ to condemn the black woman - that the incident had happened while she was employed in a job that was not her present USDA job - but to bring forward the reaction of the NAACP participants while she was _telling_ the story. She knew that they ending was that she had learned something about equality - that both blacks and whites could be poor and need help - but the NAACP audience _didn't_ know that was the ending. Yet, as she was telling the story, you can hear them in the background making approving sounds of Mmmhmmm..._Yep_ ... that sort of thing. His point was that while the NAACP made claims of racism last week about the Tea Party incident that still has not been proven, they have their own problems with racism - and this video proves it. They demand that the Tea Party do something about racists in their organization, but deny that racism exists in the NAACP.

Joel said...

They were mmmhmmming, all right, but I heard the rest of the audio on the radio this morning while working on the lair and they mmmhmmmed just as enthusiastically through the part where she upbraided herself for blowing the guy off because he was white, and decided the problem was poverty rather than race.

I won't suggest there aren't racists in the NAACP, because there probably are. Hey, I'm a white guy from Detroit. I know blacks can be racist. But now that I've heard the whole thing, I can see that video clip was very misleadingly edited. There wasn't a lot of racism going on during that part of the meeting.

It's just like those news pieces last year about the racist Tea Partiers bringing rifles to an Obama appearance, cropping the photo so nobody could see the rifle-carrier was black.