Nothing that’s recorded is private. Just look at the Nixon administration. If you’re on a listserv with 500 other people, you have to assume that you are e-mailing to a public forum. Even if all 500 folks are sworn to secrecy, what about their e-mails accounts? Who’s sharing an e-mail account with their spouse, or reading it on a PC their hacker teen has access to, or is at work where every tidbit is being packet-sniffed by paranoid sysadmins? If there’s only a 1% chance of something leaking, well you got four or five copies of that list gone off to whomever.
If you’re a journalist, someone whose job is to dig up uncomfortable facts about people, you really ought to know better than to engage in violent political revenge fantasies in such a forum.
Then again, some people really want Rush Limbaugh to die or throw people through plate-glass windows. . .
All this shows is that this little clique of people were venal and small-minded and too stupid to realize they were giving hundreds of other people documentary evidence of their venal stupidity.
So Andrew Breitbart posts this video of Shirley Sherrod, (former) USDA Georgia Director of Rural Development talking to the NAACP about discriminating against white people. The story she’s relating is pretty much a Mea Culpa, saying she was in the wrong, which is pretty clear by the end of he comments on the video. But, as the post shows, Breitbart wasn’t calling out Sherrod as much as he was calling out the NAACP:
Sherrod’s racist tale is received by the NAACP audience with nodding approval and murmurs of recognition and agreement. Hardly the behavior of the group now holding itself up as the supreme judge of another groups’ racial tolerance.
Thus the post starting the kerfuffle was a reaction to the NAACP condemnation of the Tea Parties based on assertions similarly lacking in research or context. It is strangely illuminating that both the NAACP and the Obama Administration immediately threw Sherrord under the bus (and I mean immediately, as in post was at 8am, resignation before 5pm the same day) before establishing the context of those remarks. Sort of proving the whole point about leaping to baseless and/or unsubstantiated charges of racism before receiving all the facts. Sensing a pattern?
Say what you want about Breitbart. He didn’t fire the woman. He didn’t even call for her resignation. He just handed them a coil of rope and said “go play with this.”
Congressman Brad Sherman:
Congressman Ciro Rodriguez:
Congressman Pete Stark:
Congressman Bob Etheridge:
Congressman Phil Hare:
From Big Hollywood.
- NASA administrator Charles Boden announces new mission for diplomatic outreach.
- Crazed Sex Poodle.
- DOJ responds to political pressure, drops default judgment against advocate of racial violence.
- Union employees assault black man for distributing political literature.
- Former Klansman, opponent of Civil Rights, dies at 92.
Happy 4th of July.