The new new Mighty Wurlitzer, this time with More Evil

I haven't been posting much lately, and to those few loyal readers out there, well, damn, I'm sorry. But work has been rather work-like lately, and, frankly, it seems like every day there is some new example of just how Sisyphean the task of fighting back against bullshit has become. The Shirley Sherrod fiasco is the latest illustration of how easily a con man can take advantage of an administration and the media -- not to mention a truly unsophisticated NAACP, destroying people's lives in the process.

The Atlantic's Josh Green puts it best.

Breitbart focuses on race. Today's episode with Shirley Sherrod, who was forced to resign from the Agriculture Department on the basis of a doctored and intentionally misleading videotape (see below), is an especially ugly case in point, calculated to stir the very worst racial resentments. This time the political world--the NAACP, the Agriculture Secretary--moved as quickly as the media world to unthinking response, and I suspect it happened precisely because race was involved. I don't doubt that the administration's understandable desire to avoid racial issues played a big part in how this turned out.

But what's galling to me--gut-wrenching, really, like watching old news footage of blacks being beaten and clubbed at lunch counters--is that Breitbart obviously understood the powerful effect his tape would have, posted it anyway, and then assumed the role of ringmaster, expertly conducting the media circus, fanning the flames. It's hardly the first time. But the moral ugliness of what's just happened is glaring, and it's hard for me to see how the media can justify continuing to treat Breitbart as simply a roguish provocateur. He's something much darker.

Breitbart wants to claim this isn't about him or Sherrod. It's about the NAACP, he says, which "spent an inordinate amount of airtime trying to brand the Tea Party as racist”. But no, it's about Breitbart and the rest of the cowardly motherfuckers, like Beck and Limbaugh who see no problem in using the power of their medium and the turnip pickers in the press to destroy a person's reputation and livelihood in an effort to punish some group that had the audacity to criticize them or an organization with which they share "values." That the press still, Pavlov's dog-like and after this and this, responds to their provocations and their videos (which, inevitably turns out to be less then meets they eye) so predictably, makes me almost too furious to write. At least coherently.