Vilsack Says He Tried Quitting, And That Immigrants Fondle Your Cheap Food

Tom Vilsack has had some not-fun times lately, according to prominent body language experts, due mostly to that one time he fired Shirley Sherrod for being racist because Andrew Breitbart told him to. Like many Washington politicians looking for redemption do, Vilsack gave his side of the story in a long talk with the Politico, a pioneering magazine founded by Andy Warhol that prints interviews of insiders by insiders, edited in an eclectic style. Tom tells fellow raconteur Roger Simon about some fascinating stuff: about how Rahm Emanuel won’t let him go back to Iowa in shame; about how all political decisions in Washington are made two lines of BlackBerry screen text at a time; and about his plans for violent suicide.

Do you want to hear about the thoughtful, deliberative way in which important personnel decisions are made in our nation’s capital? Well, here you go!

On July 19, Vilsack was hurrying to address a meeting with a group of constituents of an Ohio congressman. As he was about to enter the room, an aide stopped him and held up a BlackBerry with a few sentences from a speech by Shirley Sherrod, the Georgia state director for rural development at the USDA. In the excerpts, Sherrod, who is black, seemed to indicate she had denied help to a white farmer because of his race.

And then he fired her! 30 or so words on a glowing BlackBerry screen? BOOM! That will lose you your job. There is no room for context, on a smartphone!

Anyway, once the full extent of the fuckup was clear, Vilsack tried to quit. BUT THERE IS NO QUITTING ON PLANET RAHM.

Did you think of resigning? I asked Vilsack.

“Sure,” he said. And he talked to Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and Obama senior counselor David Axelrod and then he “indicated to the president I would do whatever I needed to do.”

And?

“And there was no appetite for resignation at the White House,” Vilsack said.

Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod like having Tom Vilsack around, to laugh at.

However, in the course of the interview, Vilsack does something much worse than destroying the life of one of his perfectly nice employees: he implies that maybe illegal immigrants should not all be rounded up and put into trains headed back to Mexico.

“Somewhere between 50 to 60 percent of the food you eat has been touched by immigrant hands, and it is fair to say some of them are not here as they should be here. But if you didn’t have these folks, you would be spending a lot more — three, four or five times more — for food, or we would have to import food and have all the food security risks. Neither is what Americans want. What they want is what we have.”

What the hell, Tom? Americans do not want filthy illegal hands touching their food! YOU LIE. Immigrants are bad and provide no economic benefit to real Americans. You have signed your death warrant with this statement, Tom Vilsack. It is your suicide note. Will your suicide at least be quiet and dignified?

On Vilsack’s desk is an iron hand grenade in the shape of an ear of corn. It is to remind him that “sometimes you have to blow up the place.”

Apparently not. [Politico]