Andrew Breitbart: An Asshat on a Mission to Seek and Destroy… Shirley Sherrod's Life

Oh, do shut up.

After Andrew Breitbart, whose name has become synonymous with “bullshit artist,” was revealed to be the bullshit artist that he is, one would think that he and the Washington Asshat Brigade would just shut the FU already.

But of course not, because these people are relentless and crazy.

I tried to avoid writing about the Shirley Sherrod shenanigans because the whole thing is so utterly ridiculous that I couldn’t take it seriously.  I couldn’t even be bothered.  (Plus, I was mad busy at work.)  Some shit went down, and per the usual, no one was ready, the Obama Administration got all fired up and acted the fool, the NAACP acted the fool, and the Asshats sat back and laughed and laughed.

Still, it seemed like it was all over before it began.  But no.  Now that Sherrod is suing Breitbart (and she damn well should), the Asshat Fart Fox Noise Machine is kicking it up a knotch.  Just like Emeril.  BAM!

For those who don’t know about all this nonsense, grab a towel. Your head is going to explode.  Trust me.

Ready?  Here we go.

Andrew Breitbart is, in a word, a  fucking asshat. Remember the ACORN dust up? How the right wing was screaming about ACORN is the devil’s minion, and that devil is Obama?

If you don’t recall, Breitbart was in cahoots with some fool, James O’Keefe, who, in an attempt to expose ACORN as socialist baby-killing haters of America, freedom, and American-style freedom french fries, posed as a pimp along with some lady asshat posing as his “ho,” walked into some ACORN offices and asked the workers if they could help him do a Bunch of Illegal Shit.  And they did!  (Or at least it appeared that way.)  The media couldn’t shut up about it.  Even Jon Stewart bought it!

Admittedly, when the story broke, I was a little “wha?!” even though it just didn’t sit right with me.

Well, it turned out that O’Keefe and Breitbart heavily edited those tapes to make it look like ACORN was doing A Bunch of Illegal Shit that it actually was not doing.

Some of the ACORN workers weren’t above board (i.e., registering Mickey Mouse as a voter and such nonsense), but ACORN the organization fired those people and was not guilty of doing The Bunch of Illegal Shit that Breitbart and his buffoons accused them of doing.

And yes, there is a difference. There’s no “one rotten apple spoils the bunch” rule of law. One cannot impute the wrongdoings of a handful of ACORN workers to the entire organization without some evidence that the muckity mucks at the top of the organization were involved.  To do so would be like saying “Mark Foley totally molested a bunch of congressional pages, therefore… HOLY CRAP! CONGRESS IS A CHILD MOLESTER!  Not one member of Congress, or some members of Congress – Congress as a whole — INCLUDING THE FUCKING BUILDING — is a child molester, which, when you think about it, isn’t that far-fetched.  I mean, you’ve seen the top of the Capitol building:

Looks pretty phallic to me.

Not to mention the Washington Monument –

— which is a ginormous white penis with a red eye that glows at night.  (Those of you who have seen the Washington Monument at night, y’all know what I’m talking about)  That dirty filthy monument sits there on its high horse with its laser eye, watching for little childrenses to swoop down upon and poke… in the butt.  And, and, AND, it was named after George Washington, who was — yep, you guessed it — A CHILD MOLESTER.”

See how that makes no fucking sense? Of course you do.

But Breitbart and O’Keefe (who, by the way, was busted for breaking and entering into Senator Mary Landrieu’s office in New Orleans and received only three years probation) play to the most mentally deficient among us (tea bagging, right wing, brown people deporting, Fox News watching, fucktards). These two idiots sell bullshit, Fox News buys bullshit and feeds it directly into the gaping maws of the Idiocracy.  From Gawker:

The right-wing zealots were forced to release their unedited ACORN pimp tapes to California Attorney General Jerry Brown. Brown found that O’Keefe had never claimed to be a pimp, and that the editing was creative to the point of dishonesty.

He’s not the first to find similar nefariousness behind the ACORN tapes. James O’Keefe, an activist who thinks he’s a journalist, had claimed that he’d wandered into ACORN offices dressed as a pimp, accompanied by a friend dressed as a prostitute, and found them willing to dispense illegal advice. Previous investigations had found that, [he] and Andrew Breitbart (his mentor at BigGovernment.org, who aired the videos) had done some, um, creative editing.

But Brown’s findings are the most damning yet. Here, via MediaMatters, is one excerpt from Brown’s office’s report, and another from their press release. The findings echo those of all the professionals — including the Brooklyn DA’s office — who have looked into the matter. ACORN was by no means perfect, but:

• O’Keefe stated he was out to make a point and to damage ACORN and therefore did not act as a journalist objectively reporting a story. The video releases were heavily edited to feature only the worst or most inappropriate statements of the various ACORN employees, and to omit some of the most salient statements by O’Keefe and Giles.

• Videotapes secretly recorded last summer and severely edited by O’Keefe seemed to show ACORN employees encouraging a “pimp” (O’Keefe) and his “prostitute,” actually a Florida college student named Hannah Miles, in conversations involving prostitution by underage girls, human trafficking and cheating on taxes. Those videos created a media sensation.

• Evidence obtained by Brown tells a somewhat different story, however, as reflected in three videotapes made at ACORN locations in California. One ACORN worker in San Diego called the cops. Another ACORN worker in San Bernardino caught on to the scheme and played along with it, claiming among other things that she had murdered her abusive husband. Her two former husbands are alive and well, the Attorney General’s report noted. At the beginning and end of the Internet videos, O’Keefe was dressed as a 1970s Superfly pimp, but in his actual taped sessions with ACORN workers, he was dressed in a shirt and tie, presented himself as a law student, and said he planned to use the prostitution proceeds to run for Congress. He never claimed he was a pimp.

• O’Keefe asked for, and was granted immunity from prosecution for breaching California’s privacy laws in exchange for the unedited tapes.

So then comes this Shirley Sherrod business.

Asshat of the Year, Andrew Breitbart posted this bullshit on his website because his delicate sensibilities were offended by the rightful charges of racism being lobbed at the Tea Party.  (I wrote about that issue here.)

Breitbart rambles on about “No way, we’re not racist! It’s black people who are racist! They’re marginalizing us! And the NAACP is helping them! Quick somebody call the sheriff! And then shoot him! And then blame the deputy! (Because he’s black and he musta done it.)”

And then comes the bullshittiest bullshit that you ever did see:

We are in possession of a video from in which [sic] Shirley Sherrod, USDA Georgia Director of Rural Development, speaks at the NAACP Freedom Fund dinner in Georgia. In her meandering speech to what appears to be an all-black audience, this federally appointed executive bureaucrat lays out in stark detail, that her federal duties are managed through the prism of race and class distinctions.

In the first video, Sherrod describes how she racially discriminates against a white farmer. She describes how she is torn over how much she will choose to help him. And, she admits that she doesn’t do everything she can for him, because he is white. Eventually, her basic humanity informs that this white man is poor and needs help. But she decides that he should get help from “one of his own kind”. She refers him to a white lawyer.

Sherrod’s racist tale is received by the NAACP audience with nodding approval and murmurs of recognition and agreement. Hardly the behavior of the group now holding itself up as the supreme judge of another groups’ racial tolerance.

The second video affirms the real reason there is tension between the Democratic Party and a growing mass of middle Americans — and it’s not because of race.

The NAACP which has transformed from a civil rights group to a propaganda arm of the Democratic Party and social-justice politics, supports a new America that relies less on individualism, entrepreneurialism and American grit, but instead giddily embraces, the un-American notion of unaccountability and government dependence. Shirley Sherrod, a federal appointee who oversees over a billion dollars of federal funds, nearly begs black men and women into taking government jobs at USDA — because they won’t get fired.

(If you have a brain, it has probably exploded by now, and for that I’m sorry. But welcome to my world. Quit complaining. The first explosion hurts the most. You’ll get used to it.)

Well, of course the Asshats (led, as usual, by Fox News) started screaming about how Sherrod is a racist. From Media Matters:

Fox News amplifies Breitbart’s deceptively edited video. On July 19, FoxNews.com reported: “Days after the NAACP clashed with Tea Party members over allegations of racism, a video has surfaced showing an Agriculture Department official regaling an NAACP audience with a story about how she withheld help to a white farmer facing bankruptcy.” The FoxNews.com article further reported that “[t]he video clip was first posted by BigGovernment.com” and that “FoxNews.com is seeking a response from both the NAACP and the USDA.” The article is no longer available on FoxNews.com but was republished on another website:

Then Fox Nation piled on:

And as you can imagine, the right-wing nutjobs started frothing at the mouth.  Eventually, Sherrod resigned after receiving death threats and nasty emails and the typical crap one comes to expect from these asshats.

This nonsense went on for a couple of days until the wife of the farmer in question — the farmer whose life Sherrod supposedly ruined because ZOMG! SHE HATES WHITEY! — was interviewed by CNN:

But Spooner, who considers Sherrod a “friend for life,” said the federal official worked tirelessly to help the Iron City couple hold onto their land as they faced bankruptcy back in 1986.

“Her husband told her, ‘You’re spending more time with the Spooners than you are with me,’ ” Spooner told the AJC.”She took probably two or three trips with us to Albany just to help us out.”

Later, the farmer himself vindicated Sherrod, saying that those who were calling her racist “don’t know what they are talking about” and that Sherrod had done “her level best” to help the Spooners save their farm. And she actually did help them save their farm.

So everything is cool now, right?

WRONG!

Of course the Asshats didn’t shut up. Breitbart even had the gall to say on CNN — John King’s show — that CNN was somehow abdicating its reporting duty by failing to ask for identification from the cute white farmer couple:

“If the other video is so important to you in order to push this story, why aren’t you doing your reporting?” Breitbart then said: “You’re going off of [Sherrod's] word that the farmer’s wife is the farmer’s wife. What type of extra reporting have you done on this?”

Yeah. Seriously.  That happened.

Finally, the NAACP released the full video of Sherrod’s comments during which she states that “working with him [the white farmer] made me see that it’s really about those who have versus those who don’t” and that “they could be black, and they could be white, they could be Hispanic. And it made me realize then that I needed to work to help poor people – those who don’t have access the way others have.”

So, now, it’s over, right?  Sherrod has been vindicated, so it has to be over!  We can move on to the next trumped up scandal about how black people are trying to eat your babies and kill your grandma, can’t we?

No!?!?

Why the hell not!?!?!

BECAUSE THE ASSHATS WON’T FUCKING SHUT UP!

Again, from Media Matters:

• Limbaugh: “Andrew Breitbart was exactly right. … If you listen to the whole speech … she’s racist.” On the July 22 edition of his radio show, Rush Limbaugh claimed,”Andrew Breitbart was exactly right. This woman did not have an epiphany when she was at the USDA. When she was speaking to the NAACP, she did not have an epiphany. … If you listen to the whole speech, as people have, 43 minutes, she’s racist. The NAACP is racist.”

• Levin: Sherrod is a “race-baiter.” On July 23, Mark Levin called Sherrod a “race-baiter,” “an idiot” and claimed, “Breitbart was right about her.”

• Hannity: Sherrod “still admits” “discriminating against this white farmer.” On the July 20 edition of Fox News’ Hannity, Sean Hannity said that Sherrod “still admits that she was discriminating against this white farmer” even though the full context of Sherrod’s comments were available at the time of his program.

• Hoft: “Obama called radical Shirley Sherrod today to … apologize for firing her for her racist remarks.” In a July 22 Gateway Pundit post, Hoft wrote, “Barack Obama called radical Shirley Sherrod today to … apologize for firing her for her racist remarks at an NAACP event in March.” Hoft posted part of a Wall Street Journal article about the phone call and again claimed, “Far left anti-white radical Shirley Sherrod is linked to terrorist Bill Ayers like Barack Obama.”

• Andy McCarthy: “Ms. Sherrod’s Speech Was Most Certainly Not About Transcending Racism.” In a July 22 National Review Online post, Andy McCarthy wrote: “I don’t understand the sudden pendulum swing in the other direction. Now, in Take Two, we are to understand that Ms. Sherrod was not exhibiting racism. Instead, ‘taken in context,’ we’re told, she is actually a heroic figure who has transcended the racist views that, given the terrible things she saw growing up in the South, were understandable.” McCarthy posted parts of her speech and wrote: “Pardon me, but I think I’ll stay off the Canonize Shirley bandwagon. To me, it seems like she’s still got plenty of racial baggage. What we’re seeing is not transcendence but transference. That’s why the NAACP crowd reacted so enthusiastically throughout her speech.”

The Asshats then trotted out the “she’s a Marxist radical socialist” talking point:

• Fox News said that Sherrod may be among the “radicals, racists, socialists” that are “stocked” in the Obama administration.

• Some other asshat at Gateway Pundit said that Sherrod is linked to Bill Ayers who is linked to Barack Obama who is linked to terrorists who are linked to Kevin Bacon. That’s only four degrees!  (Which means, necessarily, that Kevin Bacon is a terrorist.  Somebody better arrest that footloose motherfucker.)

And still, we’re not done: The Asshats started calling her a liar, and this is where it gets really disgusting. (Prepare for another head explosion… it won’t hurt as much this time. Trust me. I know of what I speak.)

During her NAACP speech, Sherrod talked about a relative, Bobby Hall, who was lynched in the 1940s:

“I should tell you a little about Baker County. In case you don’t know where it is, it’s located less than 20 miles southwest of Albany. Now, there were two sheriffs from Baker County that — whose names you probably never heard but I know in the case of one, the thing he did many, many years ago still affect us today. And that sheriff was Claude Screws. Claude Screws lynched a black man. And this was at the beginning of the 40s. And the strange thing back then was an all-white federal jury convicted him not of murder but of depriving Bobby Hall — and I should say that Bobby Hall was a relative — depriving him of his civil rights.”

Some fool at American Spectator tried to call her out:

Jeffrey Lord, writing in the American Spectator on July 26, claimed that Sherrod’s story in her NAACP speech about how her relative Bobby Hall had been lynched was “not true. It did not happen.” Lord’s explanation was that because Hall was beaten to death by three law enforcement officials, rather than hanged, he had not been lynched. Lord went on to ask, “Did Ms. Sherrod deliberately concoct this story in search of a piece of that ugly romance to add ‘glamour’ to a family story that is gut-wrenchingly horrendous already?” He adds that “nine Justices of the United States Supreme Court” — in the ruling they issued following the trial of Hall’s killers in the 1940s — “says not one word about Bobby Hall being lynched.”

[SIDENOTE: do you think it’s possible that the fact she had relatives that were MURDERED by crazy white people would have something to do with her initial mistrust of white folks? Do ya? Do ya? Huh? Huh? Of course you do, because you’re not a fucking idiot.]

Now, technically, “lynching” a person refers to hanging him (or her).  In the black community, however, especially among black folks who lived through the government-sanctioned violence and horror that was perpetrated upon black people as a matter of course, the phrase “lynching a black man” covers a wide variety of heinous crimes, including, hanging, shooting, beating, and hunting black people like animals (people literally used to “release” black men into the woods and then HUNT THEM…LIKE DOGS… WITH DOGS (bloodhounds).)

So this asshat at the American Spectator is calling Sherrod a liar because her relative wasn’t hanged from a tree, but rather had the shit beat out of him by some cops… because being beaten to death isn’t as “glamorous” as being hanged?  WHAT?!?!?!

Yeah. I know. Me too.

Lord’s own colleagues called him out for talking crazy, “What on Earth is Jeffrey Lord talking about on his main page… Lynching is defined as an extrajudicial killing by a mob (which can be as few as two people.) The fatal beating of Bobby Hall most certainly qualifies.”

What was Lord’s response? Did he apologize or correct his ridiculously offensive statements? No, of course he didn’t.  Asshats do not adhere to the same rules of logic that non-asshats do:

Random House Webster’s College Dictionary defines lynching as: “to put to death, esp. hanging by mob action and without legal authority.”

I have read the Court’s decision. Three people are not a “mob.” A mob is defined as a “large crowd.” So there was no “mob action” because there was no mob. Second, the Supreme Court specifically said the Sheriff and his deputy and a local policeman acted “under color of law.” Which means they had legal authority.

So to say that Bobby Hall was lynched is, factually, according to the Supreme Court and, if you prefer, Webster’s, not true. No mob. Therefore no “mob action.” And the three had “legal authority.”

(Right. Because we all know that the Supreme Court never gets anything wrong when it comes to insular minorities — ::cough cough:: — Korematsu v. United States, Dred Scott v. Sandford, Plessy v. Ferguson.)

Yeah, you're a person, but just not the right kind of person. Sorry. NEXT!

I mean, what.the.fuck.

Is this guy seriously calling Sherrod a liar because her relative was beaten by a bunch of racist assholes rather than hanged by a bunch of racist assholes?  (Oh, I’m sorry. Not a bunch. Because three people aren’t a bunch, right?  It’s just a racist trio of asshats.)

Remember James Byrd? In 1998, in Jasper, Texas, Byrd was dragged to his death after being beaten, spray painted, and chained by his ankles to the back of a pick up truck.  Remember that?  How many people/media outlets/whatnots referred to incident as a “lynching” or a “modern-day lynching.” If I answered “a fuck load,” would you believe me?  Are all of these people liars too?  Is Teh Googlez a liar?

Render unto me an extremely large break.

But wait!  There’s more!

Now the Asshats are attempting to connect Sherrod to Bill Ayers because HE’S SCARY, Y’ALL!!!  (Even though he’s not (anymore ??) and is a professor at University of Illinois.)

You see, Shirley’s husband Charles Sherrod was one of the founders of the SNCC (the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee), which has (apparently) evolved from a non-violent group into a pro-violent group.  Back in the day, the SNCC was all about sit-ins and kumbaya and a little thing called the March on Selma.

Now that Mein Afro Führer is in the White House,  all of the Black Pantheresque terrorist cells have been activated and the previously peace, love, and harmonious SNCC is all about blowing your shit up!

::shakes head::

Seriously, y’all, what the hell is going on around here?   It is unbelievable. White people are freaking right the hell out.*** They are losing their shit.  Their collective cheese has slipped off their cracker.  And it’s only going to get worse if the Republicans take back the house. Crazyface Michele Bachmann is already saying it’s going to be a subpoena clusterfuck if the Republicans have their way. They are going to find some skeleton in Barack’s closet (probably some dead hooker he shagged on the night of his inauguration), and then try to impeach him.  Just you watch.

Are you ready for the Lewinsky-gate of the aughts? Because you’re about to get it.  I hope there aren’t any White House interns with any blue dresses.  Blue dress fire sale, y’all.  It’s time.

*** not all of them obvs, but a lot of them, and too many of them live in Arizona and are murdering brown people in cold blood.  It’s fucking scary.

[via Media Matters for America, Black Snob, Wonkette, Think Progress, and Gawker]