Will the Shirley Sherrod story be the straw that breaks the camel’s back? Will everyone finally acknowledge the agenda of the right wing media?

I rather doubt it. However, there are some signs of hope. For those who don’t know what this story is about, here are some good links to get the idea of what went down. This one is from Crooks and Liars and this one is from HuffPo.

The roles that Andrew Breitbart and Fox News played in this travesty are so egregious that even moderate conservatives are pushing back. Here is David Gergen, vaid Crooks and Lairs.

Cooper: Given what we now know, should Miss Sherrod have been forced to resign?

Gergen: Absolutely not... absolutely not. Anderson this is ripped away the veil and shown us all that is wrong with politics today. An ideologue injects poison into the Internet, other people rush to judgment on camera and then the administration gave its stamp to beat it and commits this travesty and injustice. What is needed now, the NAACP has at least had the courage to come back and say we were wrong and apologized. Now the administration needs to do the same thing.

I think the President tonight ought to order the Agriculture Department to reopen this case, give this woman a fair hearing and if the facts are as they seem, reinstate her with an apology indeed. I think she deserves a whole lot more than an apology. I think she deserves an honor for her attempts to bring people together.

Here is David Frum, via The Week.

But you’ll never guess who emerged as the villains of the story in this second-day conservative react. Not Andrew Breitbart, the distributor of a falsified tape. No, the villains were President Obama and the NAACP for believing Breitbart's falsehood.

CNN actually spent a good portion of one of its news days to debunk this story. So, finally, maybe everyone is actually beginning to be willing to recognize and point out the extreme agenda Fox News and people like Brietbart have. They aren’t there to report news. They are there to manufacture news that is to their liking and supports their agenda, which is currently to make Democrats and President Obama look as bad as possible. They certainly succeeded in this case, as they did in bringing down ACORN with the same type of video manipulation. That is what they do. They have no other reason for existing, other than making money, of course.

This is why I really hold out very little hope that this country will ever regain anything that looks to be an “even keel.” We have people in positions of power and influence that have absolutely no compunction against manipulating truths and spouting outright lies, as long as it gets them what they want. They don’t really even care if they are caught, because they know there will be no adverse ramifications for them. In several weeks, this little “dust up” will be all but forgotten and they will play their little game with someone else. There are no grownups in the room to stop them, and we certainly cannot count on any of these people to come to their senses on their own volition.

We have media who lie to and manipulate their audience. We have mega-corporations that rape the only planet we have while making obscene amounts of money, and they will lie and cheat in order to be able to make as much money as they can. Even when their misdeeds are out there for the entire world to see, they still cannot make themselves do the right thing. We have politicians that are in the pocket of these same mega-corporations and will vote anyway that their masters want them to. A significant number of elected officials continue to make statements that have people wondering if these elected officials ever made it out of high school.

This country is so screwed. The eight years of the presidency of George Bush only cemented that fact. All this that I am talking about was already around. It all became institutionalized during the reign of George Bush, however. I don’t see any chance of things really ever changing for the better.

Getting back to the original story, I hope that Ms. Sherrod finds another job, one that she finds very fulfilling and provides her the same or greater pay than the job she from which she was forced out. If the Dept. of Agriculture does offer her her old job back (after the appropriate amount of “study”, of course), I hope she throws it back in their faces and sues everyone involved. Fox News, Andrew Breitbart and the Dept. of Ag. Everyone. At least I will come away with some vicarious satisfaction that assholes and thugs don’t always get away with their misdeeds.