He Said/She Said Lunkhead
by digby
Howard Kurtz is an utter fool for finding equivalence between Shirley Sherrod, Howard Dean, Joan Walsh and Andrew Breitbart for any number of reasons. I would defend Joan on this, but she’s done it perfectly well for herself, and she makes the right point about Dean as well. He is not a journalist. Indeed, among those four named above the only one is Walsh and she is perfectly correct in labeling FOX racist when, among other things, they just spent two weeks ginning up a story about “black panthers” which has no basis and which can only be seen as a tool to sow racist animus.
What makes me want to slam my head into a wall repeatedly is the notion that there is any equivalence between Breitbart and Sherrod. It’s so offensive on so many levels that I can only assume that Kurtz believes that Sherrod rightly pointing out that Breitbart is a racist is the same as Breitbart wrongly pointing out that Sherrod is one. I’ve seen cases of he said/ she said before, but this really takes the cake.
Unless you are a person who believes that racism doesn’t exist — or subscribe to some philosophical view that one can never know if someone else is a racist unless they come right out and admit it — then this is an insulting position for any rational person to take. Sherrod’s own words and deeds speak for themselves. And regardless of what’s in his heart, Breitbart’s do as well. Any fudging of the lines between the two is an act of intellectual obtuseness and/or moral cowardice.
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