Tom Vilsack Fires Shirley Sherrod As the Summer of Firings Over Nothing Continues
Yesteday, we linked to a dumb attempt by human poop-leech Andrew Breitbart to paint the NAACP as racist hypocrites. Wow, that certainly was silly! Everyone can see how silly that was! Oh no? Not everyone? Right, our modern political discourse requires us to treat baseless incendiary attacks by scumbags as serious while treating the actual things that matter as unimportant. SORRY, WE FORGOT. You know who treats the drivel Andrew Breitbart says seriously? Not nobody . Just the NAACP and USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack and also the Obama administration, the most powerful thing in the country. OH, THEM.
We called Breitbart's video of the USDA's Georgia Director Of Rural Development Shirley Sherrod "BORING" and told you not to watch it. Well, we were wrong. Apparently it is important just because Andrew Breitbart says it is . So let us tell you more about it.
In the video, you see, Shirley Sherrod made the admirable admission that she felt she acted a little prejudiced one time. Not crazily racist or anything, just that she felt she didn't help a man as much as she could have at the moment. It was completely understandable, but she used it to make a small insight into race and poverty in America about something that happened decades ago in a speech at a relatively very unimportant banquet.
No, this farmer thing was not new; it happened decades ago. No, Shirley Sherrod was not working for the government at the time when she did it. No, she is not really a major public figure or in any way the face of the NAACP or racism or cool tractors that go vroom-vroom on farms in Georgia.
Oh, and the family of the man against whom Sherrod was apparently prejudiced? They feel she did do everything she could have done to help him. Here's Pareene:
Sherrod belonged to an organization set up during the civil rights era specifically to help black farmers. So, yes, she had some reservations the first time she was approached for help by a white farmer. Then she sent him to a white lawyer for help, because she thought the white lawyer would help one of his own kind. But she learned an important lesson that day: When you're poor, no one wants to help you, no matter your race!
Because the entire point of Sherrod's story was to illustrate how her eyes were opened to that fact, she went on in her speech to explain that she "eventually worked with the man over a two-year period to help ward off foreclosure of his farm and ... eventually became friends with him and his wife."
And apparently this comes through in the rest of the speech, which has now been released.
None of this matters, though, when you are a hate goblin named Andrew Breitbart. Some hippies were mean or something to Breitbart one time, and thus Breitbart turned into this odd, probably belief-less creature who only exists to mess with libtards. So recently Breitbart was searching through piles of random NAACP-related stuff to try to find something to call racist. And so he slotted this video into that conception. And so now we are here somehow.
And so your afternoon editor hereby announces theJack Stuef $100,000 Challenge! Any evidence that Andrew Breitbart is a human being with an actual set of beliefs and/or ethics will net you a cool hundred thousand! Like any Breitbart $100,000 challenge, this is probably completely unprovable. But if you can, good! Your hundredaire afternoon editor will pay you $100,000 and immediately go bankrupt, which is actually a cool and popular thing to do in America now. People are now tattooing their bankruptcy paperwork on their chests and taping them to the back window of their Hummers to show it off!
The NAACP apparently released their reaction last night. They certainly stood by her, right, as this was just a dumb ploy by Breitbart to rile them up and somehow make them look bad for having Sherrod speak to some sort of NAACP banquet about something that happened decades ago? Haha! No, nice try. They decided to immediately throw her under the bus. She was an expendable human being to them even though she did nothing wrong, and they did this all in the name of some bastardized view of good public relations:
We concur with US Agriculture Secretary Vilsack in accepting the resignation of Shirley Sherrod for her remarks at a local NAACP Freedom Fund banquet.
Racism is about the abuse of power. Sherrod had it in her position at USDA. According to her remarks, she mistreated a white farmer in need of assistance because of his race.
We are appalled by her actions, just as we are with abuses of power against farmers of color and female farmers.
Seriously? Fuck off. Fuck off. And try to remember for a second that you are called the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and not the National Association for Demonizing Random Black People Andrew Breitbart Baselessly Tells You to Demonize. Jesus Christ.
Later on, realizing what they had done to this poor, exemplary woman, the NAACP backtracked and released another statement, blaming their initial reaction on context . Yeah, no. You don't get away with doing that. There was no reason in Breitbart's original context for them to throw her under the bus. Maybe you have the responsibility to think first about what you are doing when you call people racists, NAACP. Certainly you have that responsibility if you want people to take you seriously the next time you call someone racist.
But the most depressing thing about all of this is that Tom Vilsack fired Shirley Sherrod. He fired her. Because of some dumb thing Breitbart vomited on his keyboard! He fired her!
You may remember Tom Vilsack-of-shit as the greatest failure of the 2008 presidential election. This castrato quickly realized that nobody liked him and almost immediately dropped out. But oh no, Tom had campaign debts! So Tom went around asking all the other candidates to pay off his debts in exchange for his endorsement. Hillary Clinton bit. And so, after groveling and kissing her feet, Tom Vilsack spent a year going around telling people how much he loved Hillary. God, he loved her so much! He baked pies for her! Yet somehow that stench of sack (Vil) success never brushed off on Hillary.
So it should be no surprise this man has no balls. He is a disgrace to the state of Iowa, where brave people legalized gay marriage because it was the right thing to do. And it is time for him to return to obscurity in his hometown of Mount Pleasant and enjoy his neighbors ignoring him. Here was his statement:
Yesterday, I asked for and accepted Ms. Sherrod’s resignation for two reasons. First, for the past 18 months, we have been working to turn the page on the sordid civil rights record at USDA and this controversy could make it more difficult to move forward on correcting injustices. Second, state rural development directors make many decisions and are often called to use their discretion. The controversy surrounding her comments would create situations where her decisions, rightly or wrongly, would be called into question making it difficult for her to bring jobs to Georgia.
Our policy is clear. There is zero tolerance for discrimination at USDA and we strongly condemn any act of discrimination against any person. We have a duty to ensure that when we provide services to the American people we do so in an equitable manner. But equally important is our duty to instill confidence in the American people that we are fair service providers.
First, if any Georgia farmers actually listen to Breitbart, they are the kind of people who would never respect Sherrod anyway and do not need this bogus "perception" Breitbart says is a "perception." Second, if there is zero tolerance for discrimination at USDA, you need to resign, shit-head, as you have discriminated against Shirley Sherrod for having character and being forthright and for being the unfair target of a shit-leech, something she did not choose.
The prize for most disappointing and spineless has to go to the Obama administration, however. Not only did they try to distance themselves from the Vilsack's decision, they made sure Breitbart and the reactionaries who listen to him know they agree with this firing at the same time. They are spineless two ways!
Perhaps it is too much to expect that the senior Hopey leadership would disagree with Vilsack. Because after pulling off an "outsider" victory for the Democratic nomination, the Obama team made sure to make good with the Democratic establishment, in decisions they didn't have to make such as appointing Tom Vilsack to his job, and to resume fighting political battles on the old (blowjob) turf. Maybe nothing more strikingly shows this than the occasions in which they have failed to show a spine, such as this one.
But, finally, it should not be too much to expect that the young people who gave Obama's campaign its life and make up the bulk of his current team stand up against the old Baby Boomer identity politics bullshit. They do not have to choose to deal in this bullshit. Yet there are no resignations to report, now or ever. Nobody will take the fall. They are all too pragmatic to stand up for what is right and lose their job. Some twenty-something had to draft Vilsack's dumb statement. Another had to deliver it to the press. Even more were dealing with this in the White House. And yet: silence. With nobody to stand up for "Change," whatever that meant, power defaults to the old guard who last used it. And thus Andrew Breitbart is in charge of our politics because he knows how to push these old buttons. Not Obama. Not the Democratic Party. Not the young people who should care about their country going to shit while they let these old buttons be pushed for political sideshows.
Poopheads all around.
We are Team Shirley, as everyone who is not in power seems to be at this hour. And we are on this team with Erick Erickson, for fuck's sake. There is only one solution to this problem: Obama needs to fire Vilsack and replace him with Shirley Sherrod, as she actually cares deeply about her fellow human beings and her work and is able to use her brain.
How could the powers that be be so wrong? Oh, yeah, they usually are. And they seem to be actually scared of this dumb bullshit we make fun of here. Depressing. Can we please be governed by the animals of the forest from now on? They could probably steer clear of this bullshit.
Also, can Andrew Breitbart please release a list of everyone in the country he would like to call racist? The NAACP will then also call these people racists, and then the Obama administration will see to it that they are fired. That will be much more expedient, and it's better to do it now while unemployment is high. That way it's not so distracting, and the people who are wrongly fired will have more company. They can hang out with all the other people who are being fired right now for no good reason! (Saying or writing something that could possibly be objected to is not a good reason for firing someone. This fact apparently has to be said. Over and over.) [ YouTube / Salon / Politico / CNN / TPM / NAACP / Weigel ]