Andrew Breitbart is a media genius.
He proved it originally with his brilliant handling of the ACORN ‘hooker’ scandal which he skillfully manipulated so that the corrupt media was forced, against its will, to broadcast corruption in one of Obama’s most powerful political
support groups. But Breitbart’s handing of that affair is nothing
compared to his brilliant manipulation of the Shirley Sherrod ‘white farmer’ scandal.
It all began last Monday, July 22, 2010. As the country watched in horror, Breitbart released a snippet of a tape on his “Big Government” site which showed an obscure black female official of the Dept. of Agriculture laughing
to a roomful of NAACP members about how she’d discriminated against a destitute white farmer and refused to give him the financial aid he desperately needed.
As she smirked to the room, she’d sent him instead to a white lawyer – ‘one of his own kind’ – for help.
The black woman was Shirley Sherrod – and almost immediately she became the center of a firestorm of controversy which exploded throughout the country.
Within a day of the release of that infamous tape, the head of the Dept. of Agriculture, spurred on by Obama, demanded – and received – Sherrod’s resignation.
Breitbart had won.
But then seemingly Breitbart’s actions began to explode in his face.
As Sherrod screamed in protest, FOX News released the entire text of her speech last March to the NAACP.
And there on tape Sherrod was shown supposedly repenting of her racism against a white farmer and instead championing his fight to win funds to keep his farm afloat.
Within hours of that entire tape being revealed, the entire world turned against Andrew Breitbart.
Conservatives throughout the country were enraged that he’d endangered their reputations by releasing a ‘doctored’ tape.
Breitbart, they thundered, had dealt a fatal blow to the conservative media.
I confess that I also was horrified at what I saw as the clumsiness and stupidity of Breitbart in ‘doctoring’ a tape to make a supposedly innocent woman look guilty. But now I discover I have been as guilty of haste to judgment of Breitbart as the Dept. of Agriculture was of Ms. Sherrod.
Only now am I realizing the real purpose for Breitbart’s release of that tape snippet. It was to allow him to cunningly trick the media into exposing one of the most shocking examples of corruption in the federal government – a little known legal case called “Pigford v. Glickman”.
Oink!
