A Special Comment about La Affaire Sherrod: (H/t All That Natters)
Let that stand in all it's magnificence. I can but raise my lighter high...
From the transcript:
Let me make this utterly clear: What you see on Fox News, what you read on Right Wing websites, is the utter and complete perversion of journalism, and it can have no place in a civilized society. It is words crashed together, never to inform, only to inflame. It is a political guillotine. It is the manipulation of reality to make the racist seem benevolent, and to convict the benevolent as racist — even if her words must be edited, filleted, stripped of all context, rearranged, fabricated, and falsified, to do so.
What you see on Fox News, what you read on Right Wing websites… is a manipulation. Not just of a story, not just on behalf of a political philosophy. Manipulation of a society, its intentional redirection from reality and progress, to a paranoid delusion and the fomenting of hatred of Americans by Americans. And nearly every last word of it is never, in any tangible sense, true. Ask Shirley Sherrod.
But this evil has not become institutionalized just because of the hard, soul-less work of Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes and the scum Breitbart. Our society has not bought into the premise of this 24-hour parade of feces dressed up as news just because of a clever marketing plan. The assassins of the Right have been enabled on the Left.
The legitimate media didn't first look at the whole videotape. We didn't first ask if the doctored clip perverted by the scum Breitbart didn't seem to be leading up to a "however." We didn't, even today, when even this network let this pornographer of propaganda Breitbart come on and spew his lies and his venom and his fraudulent self-defense like a quack doctor attending a life-or-death surgery, we didn't once…consider the source.
Shirley responds.
The whole affair is covered in excruciating and embarrassing detail on Media Matters - and even here, despite everything, despite the obvious facts in evidence, it's clear that the right wing and conservative posters are either wilfully missing the point, or even more disturbingly, incapable of comprehending it. Read the comments for yourself.
President Obama. This incident has been pointed to as a "teachable moment." The time has long passed to play patty-cake with the pooh-flingers and panderers. It is, indeed, time to simply put the rock in the hole. It's clear that people who would do such a thing have no regard for civilized behaviour, that they are cheats, liars and propagandists.
There is no place here for "dialogue." No room for understanding. No room for compromise. They will not suffer such a thing, so you may as well admit it. They refer to it as "Cultural warfare." You are in their minds the icon of everything unholy, and they are perfectly willing to tear your nation down around their own ears rather than suffer the "unholy" ideals of the "liberalism" they think you champion.
One comment from Media Matters shows how deep and ancient the hatred is:
I will take a liberal over a progressive or communitariast any day. Too bad the liberal party has been taken over by radicals who used to live in communes, wear flowers in their hair, hate the establishment, call the military baby-killers, call the police pigs, burned their brains with acid, pot, and cocaine, and said that you should never trust anybody over the age of 30.Yep. Those people, who protested the war, marched with MLK, campaigned for Bobby Kennedy, worked their asses off to pass the Equal Rights Amendment; those who bled and puked during the Stonewall Riots; those who stood up intending only to mildly assert out that rivers should not catch on fire all by themselves, that air should not be poisonous, that water should not be toxic, that equal access to education is a damn right, and if it ain't, it ought to be; those that championed the rights of the disabled, those that spoke up against racism... hell, those who fought and died side by side under the bombs of the Stukas, the first to die in hopes of arresting the Fascist tide - these are YOUR people, Sir!
Great group.
Yeah, some of them were outright Commies, most were not. For what the "left" is, as described by "rightists" of the authoritarian stripe are those that hold humanity to be capable of improvement, that each person must and can be expected to live up to their own better nature and that Civilization that does not support this end is no civilization at all. I don't call that "Liberalism." Unless you'd call C.S. Lewis, Gandhi and Jesus Christ "godless liberals."
Brietbart, on the other hand, stands firm with the dark and bankrupt side of history, in which the dominant assertion is that humanity is depraved, damned and doomed from birth to always make the wrong choice, that women are inherent vessels of sin and that children are wilful little spawns of hell that must be have thier disobedient natures crushed so they may earn salvation through robotic obedience to "proper authority." It is a long and brutal history of spiritual and physical abuse that runs from the very Pyramids to Augustine through George Wallace and now dribbles and spurts from the toxic twerps on "Fox and Friends."
They have picked you as being the nail that must be hammered down, the man who represents, however imperfectly, everything they despise. They want to defeat you and destroy you. And don't take that as an impersonal distaste, if they could skin you alive and draw and quarter you live on FOX, not only would they do so, FOX would gain it's highest ratings ever. It's personal. It's as personal as it gets.
And for everyone, who they CAN get to, who they can destroy, who serve as their surrogate targets, it is personal. You owe them your position, and you owe them better.
Sir, you wished to be a Leader. Lead.
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