Vil-Sack Up, People

I've held my tongue on the whole Shirley Sherrod story because I knew better than to believe anything Andrew Breitbart put out.  Unfortunately, the Obama administration hasn't figured that out yet.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said Wednesday he will reconsider the department's decision to oust a black employee over racially tinged remarks after learning more about what she said.

Vilsack issued a short statement early Wednesday morning after Shirley Sherrod, who until Tuesday was the Agriculture Department's director of rural development in Georgia, said she was pressured to resign because of her comments that she didn't give a white farmer as much help as she could have 24 years ago.

Sherrod said her remarks, delivered in March at a local NAACP banquet in Georgia, were part of a larger story about learning from her mistakes and racial reconciliation, not racism, and they were taken out of context by a blogger who posted only part of her speech.

Vilsack's statement came after the NAACP posted the full video of Sherrod's comments Tuesday night.

"I am of course willing and will conduct a thorough review and consider additional facts to ensure to the American people we are providing services in a fair and equitable manner," Vilsack said.

The Obama administration's move to reconsider her employment was an absolute reversal from hours earlier, when a White House official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said President Barack Obama had been briefed on Sherrod's resignation after the fact and stood by the Agriculture Department's handling of it.

But growing calls for the administration to reconsider the decision put pressure on Vilsack, who stressed that the decision to ask for her resignation was his alone.

The NAACP, which initially condemned Sherrod's remarks and supported her ouster, later said she should keep her job. The civil rights group said it and millions of others were duped by the conservative website that posted partial video of her speech on Monday.

The white farmer in question went on CNN yesterday to say that Sherrod basically saved his farm.  Sherrod told that story because, if Breitbart had bothered to post the entire speech, she was relating how in 1986 she was wrong, that her views in 1986 were racist, and that she had to turn the other cheek.  She did, and saved the farm of Mr. Spooner while she was working for a non-profit in Georgia.  It was a story of redemption.

But that didn't stop FOX from ripping into her and completely misrepresenting the story either.  It also didn't stop the Obama administration from summarily firing her as Tom Vilsack demanded her head...and that decision came down from on high.

It's one thing for Andrew Breitbart and FOX to paint the Obama administration in the worst possible light with an obvious smear job.  What makes it unacceptable is when the Obama administration is stupid enough to fall for it. And hey, the NAACP fell for it too, as did a number of other news organizations.

Greg Sargent has excellent advice on how to proceed.

This is an opportunity for the White House to drive home the point that the Breitbart-Fox-Glenn Beck axis -- which is out to destroy this presidency -- should be accorded no credibility whatsoever by news organizations. People should demand that the White House issue clear, unequivocal condemnation of what happened here.  

I doubt they will take it, nor will they bother to explain why Vilsack fired Sherrod.

And that's the real crime here.  Breitbart does what he does on purpose.  The White House should know better.  Mistermix at Balloon Juice sums it up:

For those of us who hoped that the Obama Administration would usher in a more thoughtful, nuanced and healthy attitude about racial friction, it’s pretty clear from this case that the attitude about race internalized by Obama’s appointees is anything but subtle. We can speculate about whether the White House intervened directly in the Sherrod firing, but it’s pretty obvious from the actions of Cook and Vilsack that Obama appointees believe that the way to please the boss is to jettison anyone who makes a racial gaffe, and to do it during the current news cycle. The Sherrod firing takes us in the opposite direction from the tolerance a lot of use hoped to see.

Just because Obama isn't Bush doesn't mean the problem of career politicians and hacks in Washington has been magically solved.