Video: Andrew Breitbart Defends Sherrod Video (with updates)

Shirley Sherrod served as director of rural development in Georgia until yesterday. After an  explosive video appeared on Big Government, where she made shockingly  blatant, racist statements, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack forced her to resign.

From the get-go,  there were some in the right-wing blogosphere, most notably, The Anchoress,  who were questioning the editing of the video. It seemed like she was leading up to something redemptive…. (although her attitudes were initially, severely  jacked up).

Charles Krauthammer believes Sherrod deserves an apology, and restitution, because the full video is a heartwarming story about racial redemption:

The most disturbing part of the video for me were the murmurs of approval from her NAACP audience when she admitted that she was not going to do everything she could do for the white farmer who was facing foreclosure on his farm. That, argues Breitbart, was the main point of the video, which he says, was sent to him in two parts. Here he is defending his “get” on CNN:

Right after that appearance, he appeared on The Dana Show:

Looks to me like Shirley Sherrod got caught in the crossfire in the war between the right and the left-wing medias.

UPDATE:

Here’s the tail-end of Breitbart’s appearance on Hannity, tonight.

UPDATE II:

Breitbart debates arch-nemesis, Eric Boehlert of Media Mutters on Good Morning America. Video at Gateway Pundit.

Love the part where Boehlert robotically mutters “I’ll take John Lewis’ word…I’ll take John Lewis’ word…John Lewis is a American icon…” as Breitbart gestures: Four videos … four videos! FOUR!

The left is reduced to defending the March 20 tea party smear as a “he said, he said”, and of course they take the word of  their Alinskyized brethren. What a pathetic joke.

UPDATE III:

Tom Blumer: Shirley Sherrod’s Disappearing Act: Not So Fast

Ms. Sherrod’s previous background, the circumstances surrounding her hiring, and the USDA’s agenda may all play a part in explaining her sudden departure from the agency. These matters have not received much scrutiny to this point.

An announcement of Ms. Sherrod’s July 2009 appointment to her USDA position at ruraldevelopment.org gives off quite a few clues:

RDLN Graduate and Board Vice Chair Shirley Sherrod was appointed Georgia Director for Rural Development by Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack on July 25. Only days earlier, she learned that New Communities, a group she founded with her husband and other families (see below) has won a thirteen million dollar settlement in the minority farmers law suit Pigford vs Vilsack.

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Here are a few bigger-picture questions:

• Did Shirley Sherrod resign so quickly because the circumstances of her hiring and the lawsuit settlement with her organization that preceded it might expose some unpleasant truths about her possible and possibly sanctioned conflicts of interest?
• Is USDA worried about the exposure of possible waste, fraud, and abuse in its handling of Pigford?
• Did USDA also dispatch Sherrod hastily because her continued presence, even for another day, might have gotten in the way of settling Pigford matters quickly?

UPDATE IV:

This keeps getting better….for Breitbart:

American Power: Terry Moran on ‘Nightline’ — ‘A Kind of Victory for Breitbart’

UPDATE V:

Right  Pundits come to Breitbart’s defense:

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Dan Reihl: In Defense of Andrew Breitbart

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Andrew McCarthy: Ms. Sherrod’s Speech Was Most Certainly Not About Transcending Racism

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Matt Lewis: Ann Coulter to Sean Hannity: ‘Andrew Breitbart Was Set Up’

MORE:

RedState: Breitbart Goes Fishing for Minnows and Brilliantly Bags the Big Fish!

Fox News : Official Ousted From Agriculture Department Had Taken USDA to Court, Won

Also blogging:

Ace: After Outcry From Its Members, NAACP Decides It Was “Snookered” Beck Defends; Krauthammer Defends; So, Tentatively, Do I

Hot Air: NAACP and Glenn Beck agree: People rushed to judgment on Sherrod

Sister Toldjah: More to Sherrod/NAACP story than we know? (UPDATE: NAACP RELEASES FULL VID, SHERROD ACCUSES TP OF RACISM IN VID)

Big Government: NAACP Blames Fox and Breitbart For The NAACP’s Overreaction to Shirley Sherrod Video

Hot Air: Should Shirley Sherrod get her job back?

Ace: Nightline: Breitbart’s Moment

Flight 93 Memorial Blogburst #70: Flight 93 father says ground zero mosque is the SECOND mosque being built on a 9/11 site

This is a flight 93 memorial blogburst, which was started and is written by Alec Rawls, of Error Theory. I began participating  in the fall of 2007. Almost three years later, we are still at it:

Pamela Geller, who is leading the fight against the ground zero mosque in New York, has posted the following letter from Tom Burnett Senior.

To our fellow 9/11 families and to all who are concerned about the Ground Zero mega-mosque in New York:

We want everyone to know that the Park Service is right now building an even larger Islamic victory mosque atop the Flight 93 crash site. Many of you were outraged in 2005 when the Crescent of Embrace design was unveiled to be a half-mile wide Islamic shaped crescent:

Left: 2005 publicity shot of the Crescent of Embrace design. Right: typical Islamic crescent and star, viewed from a similar angle.

Few people know that this giant crescent actually points to Mecca, or understand the religious significance of this orientation. A crescent that points the direction to Mecca is a very familiar construct in the Islamic world. Because Muslims face Mecca for prayer, every mosque is built around a Mecca direction indicator called a mihrab. The classic mihrab is crescent shaped. Here are the two most famous mihrabs in the world:

Left: the Mihrab of the Prophet, at the Prophet’s mosque in Medina. Right: the mihrab of the Great Mosque in Cordoba Spain.

Face into the crescent to face Mecca

As with the Medina and Cordoba mihrabs, a person facing into the Crescent of Embrace will be facing Mecca. In the image below, superimposed red lines show the orientation of the Flight 93 crescent. The green qibla circle is from an online Mecca-direction calculator:

A person standing between the tips of the crescent and facing into the center of the crescent (red arrow) will be facing almost exactly in “qibla” direction (the Muslim prayer direction). You can verify the qibla direction from Somerset PA using any number of on-line Mecca-direction calculators.

To be precise, the Crescent of Embrace points 1.8° north of Mecca, ± a tenth of a degree. The final construction drawings alter this orientation slightly, so that instead of pointing a little less than two degrees north of Mecca, the actual crescent will point less than three degrees south of Mecca. Such small deviations from Mecca are insignificant by Islamic standards, which developed over a period of more than a thousand years during which far flung Muslims had no accurate way to determine the direction to Mecca.

The Park Service does not call the Crescent of Embrace a crescent anymore. Now they call it Circle of Embrace, but the only actual change was to add an extra arc of trees (planted to the rear of a person facing into the giant crescent) that explicitly represents a broken off part of the circle. The unbroken part of the circle, what symbolically remains standing in the wake of 9/11, is just the original Crescent of Embrace. It is still a giant Islamic shaped crescent, still pointing at Mecca.

This is the Park Service’s official explanation for the design: the terrorist attacks are depicted as smashing our peaceful circle and turning it into a giant crescent. A clearer depiction of Islamic victory is hard to imagine, so no one should be too surprised that the damned thing points to Mecca, and actually turns out to be a mosque.

Other mosque features

Mosque design is based on a dozen typical mosque features, every one of which is realized in the Crescent/Circle design, all on the same epic scale as the half mile wide crescent-mihrab. Note, for instance, that the 93 foot tall minaret-like Tower of Voices is topped with another Islamic-shaped crescent, akin to the crescent-topped minarets seen in many Islamic countries:

An Islamic shaped crescent, soaring in the sky above the symbolic lives of the 40 heroes, which literally dangle down below. In Islam, there is only heaven and hell. Symbolic damnation?

The Flight 93 mosque needs to be stopped, along with the Islamic victory mosque at ground zero in Manhattan. May the fight against these two desecrations strengthen each other.

Sincerely,

Tom Burnett Senior
Loving father of Flight 93 hero Tom Burnett Junior

Pamela’s Atlas Shrugs post includes a second letter from Mr. Burnett, thanking her for her help and passing on some information about the design selection process. (The vote for was 9 to 6 from a judging panel where family members were outnumbered 8-7 by left wing design professionals.)

Want to join our blogburst against the crescent mosque?

Just send your blog’s url.

There is also an online petition that people can sign.

Contact information for the Flight 93 Memorial Project here.

Flight 93 Memorial Blogburst BlogRoll:

Video: The Kansas City Tea Party Responds To NAACP Charge Of Racism

The race card is the lefts’ increasingly obvious ploy to discredit opponents. It is as desperate as it is dishonest and it’s fooling fewer and fewer people.

Here’s the Kansas City Tea Party, Political Chips’ response to the latest transparent  attempt to smear conservatives:

Documents Prove What We All Suspected: Journalists Colluded To Kill Rev. Wright Story

Somehow…. Tucker Carlson at The Daily Caller got his hands on some more Journolist archives, and  these documents are far more consequential and damning than the documents he shared about Dave Weigel’s dopey dissing of conservatives. This time we see what many of us instinctively knew at the time was going on, and what goes on with other stories to this day: MSM journalists conspiring to ignore an important story, and smear critics. What’s their smear of choice? You all know the answer to that question…..

…in mid-April, 2008, at an ABC News debate moderated by Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos. Gibson asked Obama why it had taken him so long – nearly a year since Wright’s remarks became public – to dissociate himself from them. Stephanopoulos asked, “Do you think Reverend Wright loves America as much as you do?”

Watching this all at home were members of Journolist, a listserv comprised of several hundred liberal journalists, as well as like-minded professors and activists. The tough questioning from the ABC anchors left many of them outraged. “George [Stephanopoulos],” fumed Richard Kim of the Nation, is “being a disgusting little rat snake.”

Others went further. According to records obtained by The Daily Caller, at several points during the 2008 presidential campaign a group of liberal journalists took radical steps to protect their favored candidate. Employees of news organizations including Time, Politico, the Huffington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Guardian, Salon and the New Republic participated in outpourings of anger over how Obama had been treated in the media, and in some cases plotted to fix the damage.

In one instance, Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent urged his colleagues to deflect attention from Obama’s relationship with Wright by changing the subject. Pick one of Obama’s conservative critics, Ackerman wrote, “Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists.”

Michael Tomasky, a writer for the Guardian, also tried to rally his fellow members of Journolist: “Listen folks–in my opinion, we all have to do what we can to kill ABC and this idiocy in whatever venues we have. This isn’t about defending Obama. This is about how the [mainstream media] kills any chance of discourse that actually serves the people.”

Read the whole damning thing.

These people are naked propagandists  who would do Soviet era Pravda writers proud. This is why we declared the MSM dead after the 2008 election. This is  why we’ve come up with different pseudonyms for the MSM: LWM, fishwrap, MFM,  or Palin’s favorite: Lamestream media.

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I vividly remember writing about the  Rev. Wright affair while all this was unfolding  thanks to that primary debate in which George Stephanopoulos asked Obama about his affiliation with the Pastor. It was an important story because it revealed a lot about Obama’s radical worldview…

Here’s what I wrote at the time:

You know what? I think it’s over for Obama.

This story is going to mark the turning point of Obama’s fortunes this election year. I’m afraid there is really no escaping the truth. This man is no “uniter”. This man is no “post-racial” “healer”. His campaign is a complete sham.

He may still be able to squeak ahead of Hillary in the primaries, simply because of her low approval ratings, but this is going to be an albatross around his neck for the general.

Little did I know how deep the conspiracy was to kill the story. They did this by ignoring it,  by their constant deployment of the race card, and by their nauseating, fawning praise of Obama’s unsatisfying, unedifying “race speech” which did nothing to answer the question of why he stayed at an anti-Semitic, racist church for 20 years. For some inexplicable reason, after that speech, the story was over. The MSM closed the lid on it.  Those who who tread in those waters were accused of racism…which is almost certainly why John McCain made the Rev. Wright issue out off limits for his campaign.

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Why a bunch of moronic lowlifes should have so much influence on the news is beyond me. As Andrew Breitbart, and Tucker Carlson have proven, these slimeballs can be dealt with. The truth can come out if we’re willing to fight for it.

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That’s why their new campaign to label the tea party as racist needs to be pushed back every single day. These people lie. They plot, they collude, and they have no shame. We should have no compunction what-so-ever in calling these people out.

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See also:

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Breitbart, Big Journalism: JournoList: …Yes, But the Reporters at Pravda Weren’t Such Insufferable Assholes

Hot Air: Daily Caller discovers Journolist plot to spike Wright story, smear conservatives as racists

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More to come?…

…this first entry in the Journolist exposés — Tucker Carlson promises more to come — shows that far from being a benign place to have chats among colleagues, Journolist also served as a place for journalists to plot against their political opponents and strategize to twist the news and propose smear campaigns.

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Pssst…pass it on:

Ace: (Drew’s idea: Any mention of racism should be answered with “Did Spence Ackerman tell you to make that up?”)

Lol.

MORE:

Doug Ross: A Trip Through The Archives: The Agitprop The Journolist Conspiracy Produced

Sarah Palin: Media Bias? What Media Bias? BOMBSHELL!

Linked by Michelle Malkin, thanks!

Hey, All You Lefties Feeding Off of Sarah Palin’s “Refudiate” Gaffe….

You might enjoy this, too:

(オバマ失言で学ぶアメリカ

Translated: “He’s Not As Eloquent A Speaker As Advertised”

A book ridiculing Obama’s gaffes debuted in Japan in May.

New book out on stands in Japan which took many by surprise: Title: “Obama Shitsugen De Manabu America” , by Marie Nishimori (KK Bestsellers (2010/5/15) Subtitle: “Top 101 Gaffes of Barack Obama”

Imagine that. A whole book devoted to  Obama’s gaffes…..

That’s only vol. one, too. At the rate he’s going, there are sure to be many, many more.

RELATED:

Big Journalism: Politico’s Ben Smith More Interested in Palin Mis-tweet Than DOJ Whistleblower

Hat tip: Memorandum