Shame [Updated]

What a revealing moment we have before us in the Shirley Sherrod incident, after the rapid climb-down by the yellow-bellies in the Obama Administration who buckled in the face of the Fox News onslaught without even checking their facts.

Sherrod is the former Agriculture Department employee who was subjected to a McCarthyite assault by the creeps at Fox based on a tendentiously edited video purporting to make her look like a racist. In fact, she was speaking frankly about race in ways that one Barack Obama once did to save his election campaign--and was considered an oratorical genius afterward.

But Sherrod is merely a minor cog with no powerful friends, so she could be sent a text and told to resign while driving herself home—based on nothing more than an attack by her boss’s sworn enemies. Her dignified but obviously pained comments reveal how hurtful it must have been for a lifelong civil servant to be dumped for political reasons without even being given a chance to state her case.

It’s no wonder Obama’s poll numbers are slipping if this is how he’s coaching his minions. Their behavior is more reminiscent of the Czechoslovak Communist Party after the post-Dubcek ‘normalization’ than a democratic government.

And no wonder those of us still in charge of our faculties are feeling so gloomy about the future if these gigantic opportunities to show some cojones and stand up to the bullies are turned again and again into displays of rank cowardice by the guys we put in charge.

However, I believe it is a mistake to read this pathetic cringing by the ruling Democrats as stupidity or cluelessness. I have a much more pessimistic interpretation: complicity.

The Democratic White House acts like the hapless child of an alcoholic, desperate for any sign of right-wing approval that is always withheld. They seem psychologically colonized by the permanent abuse; instead of turning their attention to their natural allies, they chase after those who spurn them with more eager compromises, which merely reinforces their tormentors’ contempt.

If Martin Luther King, Jr., were alive today, he’d undoubtedly be one of the ‘fucking retards’ denounced by Rahm Emanuel & friends for messing up their deal-making with the reactionaries and racists that we voted out. Obama’s White House, like the Democratic Party he heads, fears the Shirley Sherrods of the land much more than the Fox News demagogues and the Limbaugh-worshiping knuckleheads who openly seek their destruction.

Sherrod’s story is one worth revisiting. She and her husband tried to save black-owned farms in Georgia despite the relentless hostility of the openly racist governor Lester Maddox and lack of support from an unresponsive federal government. What a moment to remind Americans of how race really has worked in the last 50 years instead of scrambling to deliver the head of a hard-working lady to a cabal of howling, race-baiting, white guys who run a TV network.

[Update] CNN was scrambling this morning to track down the aide at USDA who frantically texted Sherrod to get her to quit when the Fox video trickery first broke. But Sherrod defended the aide in interviews and repeated her assertion that the pressure to fire her came from the White House. Please, God, let it be Rahm Emanuel who did it! And let the networks stay interested long enough to track down the truth.

Also: More reporting, please, on the fact that Sherrod’s own father was gunned down by a white farmer in a highly dubious incident, who then was not indicted by an all-white grand jury in the time-honored southern way of doing things. But Fox doesn’t confuse the race issue with tales of mere homicide when it can play gotcha with edited videotapes.