Wheels Within Wheels

Rachel Slajda makes the case that Andrew Breitbart's real target with the Shirley Sherrod story was the Obama administration's settlement with black farmers through the USDA.

In defending his decision to fire Shirley Sherrod, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack explained multiple times that his department has a "sordid" and "checkered" history of both overt and institutionalized racism. But with the term "racism" being tossed around rather a lot recently, it is important to understand both what he meant -- and what role that acknowledged racism played in Shirley Sherrod's life.

It's also important to understand that Andrew Breitbart's timing of the release of the grossly distorted video of Sherrod, which he admits having had for weeks, may not be entirely random. Congress will soon vote on whether to fund part of a settlement between the USDA and African-American farmers who faced acknowledged discrimination -- farmers like Sherrod and her husband used to be. It's a tiny piece of the upcoming war supplemental bill.

The USDA settlements with African-American farmers are a longtime bête noire of the right, which they deem a giveaway to a core Democratic constituency. It's not clear whether Brietbart's release of the video was specifically intended to hurt the chances of other African-America farmers to receive recompense from decades of discrimination that caused them to lose their farms, but conservatives immediately used the video to attack the settlement. The discrimination claims, known globally as the Pigford settlement, is the elephant in the room, so here's the background.

For years, and continuing through the 1990s, the USDA denied loans and grants to scores of farmers simply because they were African-American. Timothy Pigford finally sued the department in 1997; the suit became a class action with 400 additional plaintiffs and 2,000 farmers thought eligible; and the result was what's known as the Pigford settlement, decided in 1999.

The Pigford settlement offered two tracks: Track A offered $50,000 (plus loan forgiveness and tax offsets) to each eligible African-American farmer who had complained of discrimination since 1983, subject to applications and reviews; Track B offered the possibility of larger damages, provided plaintiffs could show a preponderance of evidence to arbitrators, prove their losses were greater than $50,000 and, of course, wait out the process. Less than 1 percent of the 22,721 class members chose to pursue Track B.

According to multiple sources that TPMmuckraker has not independently confirmed, Sherrod and her husband, Charles, were two of only 170 plaintiffs that chose Track B. Vilsack acknowledged in his press conference that Sherrod was a claimant in the Pigford settlement. 

This is all consistent with why Breitbart was sitting on the story until now.  The confluence of the USDA black farmers settlement and the NAACP was too much for him to resist, and he pulled the trigger with the intent of ruining her life.  Mission Accomplished.

Steve M. picks up on this larger battle:  reparations.

What I mean is that the MSM believes it owes the right endless recompense for the alleged sin of having been "the liberal meda" all these years. Right-wingers have been guilt-tripping the MSM for decades. It's beyond just "working the refs" -- they've whined that they're the victims of persistent discrimination; they insist that they have a right to banish all objectivity on talk radio and Fox News because the ill effects of the discrimination they perceive haven't come close to being reversed ... and guilt-tripped editors accept this line of argument, and thus won't treat the Breitbarts and Limbaughs and Coulters and Ericksons as pariahs, no matter what lies or slurs they utter, because they feel it would be prejudicial to do so.

Right-wingers see "reparations" for African Americans taking place everywhere they look, even though no one else can see what they see. Meanwhile, real reparations -- for grossly exaggerated or nonexistent suffering -- take place every time another irresponsible demagogue of the right-wing media is given the floor by the mainstream press. And it's not likely to end soon.

Not hardly.  And now the other shoe in this messy matter falls:  the Mean Ol Liberal Media is picking on Poor, Heroic Andrew Breitbart as Dan Riehl takes to Human Events to pen his defense of the man.

The media and progressive-left Democrats now appear in a rush to convict Andrew Breitbart of shoddy journalism, while exonerating Shirley Sherrod and the NAACP from charges of abiding racism within their ranks. Both Sherrod and the NAACP have charged the Tea Party movement and the Republican Party with racism, while offering less proof than Breitbart did of the racism he correctly alleged. In many cases, the Left has outright manufactured evidence of racism regarding Tea Party events, yet no one has raised a voice about that slander at all. If one didn't know better, this wouldn't be today's news, but an Orwellian script circa 1984.

You would think that African-Americans have controlled the media for decades and had flogged whites within an inch of their lives. You're supposed to pick a side here. Andrew Breitbart is under attack by...them! Whose side are you on, anyway? They're the racists here!

And so the poor, abused, put-upon Andrew Breitbart is the hero of this story, and the woman whose life he ruined is the villain, and if you disagree...well, you're the racist, you see.

I have to hand it to Breitbart.  He's pulling out his baton and they're all playing his tune.  He's timed this for maximum damage and done it brilliantly.

Keep a careful eye on that USDA settlement vote.