Friday, July 23, 2010

Here's what I find so discouraging about the Shirley Sherrod story.

It's the reactions, or non-reactions, from everyone after it has been laid out so plain about what went on and how it was exactly like what happened to ACORN and Van Jones. The reactions seem to be able to categorized like this:

1) Who, us? We didn't do anything. It's all Obama's fault anyway. Oooh!!! Look over here! Big Mexican women helping Afghans become illegal aliens! (Fox News)

2) Gee, I feel sorry for Ms. Sherrod. She certainly went through some tough times. It's the NAACP that's the racists, that's who I was going after! ((Andrew Breitbart)

3) I don't really care what the facts are, Breitbart was correct! Shirley Sherrod is a racist and deserved to lose her job! (Wingnut commentators)

4) YAWN! Well, the White House certainly overreacted, didn't they? Yes, black eye for the Obama administration. No, Breitbart is perhaps overly enthusiastic, but he really didn't do anything wrong. And we certainly aren't going to say anything bad about our brothers at Fox News. (95% of the national media)

5) Yes, we overreacted and we did Ms. Sherrod a huge disservice. It was all the media's fault, they made us overreact. (Obama administration)

6) Um.... What? We didn't see anything. (Elected Republican officials)

7) We don't care, Democrats are evil and deserve everything they get! (1/3 of the population of the United States)

I may have missed a few, but that seems to be about how it went. Yes, the left leaning blogosphere and most of the programming on MSNBC made sure that how this all went down was well documented. But in the end, no one really cared, because it STILL is not going to be the "learning moment" that we have heard mentioned. Breitbart and Fox News are not going to stop doing what they do, because that's who they are. The official media won't stop listening to them, because that would be impolite. Politicians looking to cover their butts will still overreact to really stupid fake news stories but will not work together to address the very real problems that this country has.

Geez. After everything we have been through in the last 10 years, and people are still going to vote for Republicans. I can't believe it.

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