How a Lie Cuts

What happened to Shirley Sherrod is the most dangerous threat to American free thought and democracy — because facts are edited into lies and the deceiver plays the public, wounded, put-upon when exposed to the burning truth of their slicing falsehoods.

Mark Potok writes for Hatewatch:

On Monday, Breitbart — the same loathsome character who publicly called Ted Kennedy a “pile of human excrement” a few hours after the senator’s death — aired a video of Sherrod speaking to an NAACP banquet in Georgia last March. In his edited version, Sherrod talks about initially not wanting to help a white man who was facing the loss of his farm because of her anger toward white racists. But Breitbart, furious about the NAACP’s recent criticism of racism within the ranks of the Tea Parties, presented an edited version of the tape that left out the crucial conclusion of what was really Sherrod’s tale of redemption — that in the course of the 1986 case she was discussing, she came to realize that “the struggle is really about poor people,” and that her anti-white feelings were wrong. She said the case changed her entire outlook. (And in fact the farmer and his wife were all over the media yesterday, saying that Sherrod had saved their farm, was a fine and caring woman, and should get her job back.)

Fox immediately picked up Breitbart’s fairy tale and began plugging it, as did a number of other right-wing media outlets. (Many of them suggested that Sherrod’s actions in the 1986 case had occurred while she was an Agriculture employee — a complete falsehood.) That prompted Vilsack to have her thrown out of her job as the department’s director of rural development in Georgia — an act that Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen rightly described today as pure political “cowardice.” Vilsack didn’t bother to hear Sherrod’s side of the story first, and he didn’t watch the full videotape.

When will democrats, and other liberal thinkers, get angry enough to stand up to these sham journalists who have zero ethics and every intention of damaging basic, human, truths — like what someone actually said?

I understand the want to ignore the malicious in the blind hope it will cure the stupid, but these venom propagators rely upon the forgiving values of the Open Minded — and that’s when they strike even deeper into the dark hearts of those who don’t know any better and spoon-feed them even more delicious lies and other demon delicacies that provide the froth and the infathomability for their non-sacred, unrighteous, cures brewed in governmental non-intervention and religioso sublimation to money and power.

If we, the clear hearted and the even-tempered, do not actively prosecute these Lie Tellers — by cutting off their snake heads and recoiling their serpent tongues — who gigglingly fake their way into power by bending the truth and creating falsehoods out of facts, then we wholly deserve our cancerous political system where good people stand away and the rubes and the harlequins step forward to decide the temperature, and create the damning, intemperate, rue of our lives.