A man without standards
0 Comments | Buffalo News, Jul 27, 2010 | by Mitch Albom
If a house is burned to the ground, you can whine about the firefighters or criticize the building material but first you blame the guy who started the fire, right?
Last week, a government worker named Shirley Sherrod was axed after a video clip of her NAACP speech was used to paint her as racist. In the blink of an eye, her reputation was burned down.
But once the whole speech was revealed — proving the clip was way out of context — her bosses were booed, the NAACP was blasted, even the president was chided.
And the guy who started the fire?
As of today, he still has matches.
Andrew Breitbart is the conservative blogger who posted the edited video of Sherrod. He put it on one of his five Web sites. Breitbart, a guy who called Sen. Edward Kennedy, hours after his death, “a special pile of human excrement,” hoisted the Sherrod clip as evidence of reverse racism by the NAACP. He claimed the audience applauded such sentiments. The video showed no such thing.
But Breitbart lit the fire. He blew on the flames. As Sherrod would later tell CNN, “He knew exactly what would happen.”
So Breitbart is where this sad story begins, where the blame lies and where the punishment should be doled out — if there were any you could dole out.
Sadly, how do you punish a blogger like Breitbart? He simply slithers back into the muck that some confuse with journalism. Who does he have to answer to?
Nobody
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