No rules in a knife fight
I’m getting very tired of this kind of crap. Of foam-at-the-mouth reactionaries faking videos for Fox “News” that get people shut down or fired. They did it with that video that was supposed to show an Acorn guy helping a prostitute and a pimp get gummint funding when in fact the uncut video shows him collecting information which he gave to the police as soon as they left. Now they’ve done it with another fake video that’s supposed to show Shirley Sherrod telling a Georgia chapter of the NAACP that she refused to help a farmer because he was white when in fact she did help him. Sherrod got pushed out of her job with the Department of Agriculture yesterday because some evil windbag called Andrew Breitbart posted the faked video on his pustulent website.
Poisonous. These people are poisonous. I’m sick of them.
This is why we need to keep and even beef up some basic defamation law. This sort of premeditated, dishonest destruction of reputations has to be unlawful – in fact, I don’t see why criminal penalties shouldn’t apply in cases like these (it looks to me as if this could be a criminal offence in France, for example, under its much-abused defamation legislation). I’m a free speech advocate, and I want the law regulating speech to be as narrow as possible, but it should have real teeth with cases like this. When deliberate lies are told by the mass media to destroy ordinary people, I don’t see any genuine free speech issues.
This is one reason why I’ll never be a free speech absolutist, and indeed why absolutism about the issue strikes me as somewhat irrational.
The people concerned would probably be able to sue, even in America, but of course funding a court case is another thing, especially when you’ve just lost your job.
Well Sherrod damn well ought to get her job back, right smart quick, since she didn’t do anything wrong. Come on, Barack, step up if nobody else does. Give Sherrod her job back.
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by ManOrMoose, Ophelia Benson. Ophelia Benson said: No rules in a knife fight http://dlvr.it/2rL6m […]
I’m getting increasingly shorttempered with the wimps who roll over and do their bidding, though. What a fraggin’ lack of spine.
“It’s true because I found it on the Internet!” said the civilization as it declined.
The story couldn’t be more delicious. Righteous outrage runs into an 82 year old farmer’s wife.
For the most part, the American right is indifferent to veracity, because they’ve come to understand that they will not be held accountable. Andrew Breitbart, however, has embarrassed too many people too many times. Count on a lot of people claiming they never really knew the guy. Ask Ted Haggard.
This is one hell of a sick game they play. Either those in power react immediately to an allegation, potentially hurting a completely innocent person, or they wait and investigate it while their opponents howl about it and demand resignations from everyone up the line. And they get away with it every time.
I guess this is that compassionate conservatism we’ve all heard so much about.
Holy Fucking Shit. I keep holding out hope that one day one of these ‘compassionate conservatives’ is going to fuck up so egregiously, and get caught in such a massively tangled web of deception that the scales will fall from the public’s collective eyes and people will start realizing that reacting before having all the facts isn’t something to be admired or to aspire to, but is in fact a really fucking stupid way to be. Then a story like this breaks, and along with it comes the realization that such a day is not likely to arrive in my lifetime. Fuck.
‘Compassionate conservatism’: isn’t that an oxymoron? I am reminded of Tom Paine’s remarks on Burke:
Now, doubtless, Limbaugh and his confreres are less elegant than Burke, but they are not above shedding a few mawkish tears for what they believe is being lost — that halcyon time when white and black were kept in their distinct shrink wrapped solitudes — just so long as they can send some upstart back to the cotton fields. But, from this distance, there is a poison spreading in American society that is not only unlovely, but downright dangerous. And it’s mostly based, though this is perhaps being kept a bit understated just now, on a primitive religiousness that, true to its protestant roots, wants to keep the races separate and the religion pure. And it mainly has to do with Obama, because he’s just an upstart who thinks he can govern a great nation. Well, Burke and his downmarket pals will soon set that straight. Or am I just reading too much into an isolated piece of opportunistic racism?
OB, one of the links you provided was hilarious. The commenter called “Rational Conservative” sooo reminded me of some other folks that we’ve been dealing with lately: “Yes, I realise the credibility of the person who made this tape has been totally destroyed, but you never know … there may still be something to his story.” Where have we heard that sort of argument before?
Anyone who’s been paying attention knows that Breitbart’s a sleazy piece of…work. That’s it: he’s a sleazy piece of work. But I’m reserving my deepest comtempt for the feckless Tom Vilsack who rolled over on Breitbart’s say-so, without even a semblance of an investigation into the honesty or truth of the allegations against Ms Sherrod. Way to stand up for your people, you worthless piece of steaming dogshit!
I am very close to being a free speech absolutist, but these clear-cut cases of defamation are one of the exceptions I make. I think this type of thing results in the chilling of political speech.
Eric, I think you’re giving Limbaugh far too much credit. He’s not just less elegant than Burke–he’s also more radical and more destructive.
Rachel Maddow covered this excellently. “Dear White House, dear administration, believing conservative spin about what’s so wrong with you, and then giving in to that spin, is not an effective defense against that spin.”
Jenavir, yes…. But I give Limbaugh no credit at all. I guess my point is that if Burke was dangerous — and I think he was, despite his elegance — Peterloo didn’t come from nowhere — the bile being spilled out from people like Limbaugh, and the rest of the insane wing of the Republican Party, are not only more dangerous, but as you say, more radical. They are, in essence — no matter how much they seem to mouth platitudes about liberty and democracy — right wing, religious ideologues, rooted in race, ignorance and fear. Of course, Sherrod should get her job back, but the political virus that led to her losing it in the first place seems to be spreading in the US. Indeed, I sometimes wonder whether Obama’s ‘performance’ as President has not been made almost impossible because of the race card that continues to be played by the right with such powerful effect. He began with such promise, and while he may have made some poor decisions, the mood against him seems not to be based on actual performance, but on the public/political ethos which has been shaped by his opponents. (Expect more of this, now that the laws regarding financing elections has been shot down.) Could he have done better? Or are the limits already set? The kind of shenanigans reflected in this sad case, and how they so closely resemble the way the President is presented in the media, lead me to wonder. (Just thinking ‘out loud’.)
I would imagine anyone who looses their job due to uncorroborated gossip should have some legal comeback?
And surely the brainless idiot who didn’t check the facts should be out on their ear for gross incompetence?
Russell – why yes, that does ring a bell, doesn’t it.
I was a bit repulsed to see John Wilkins blow off your mild protest at his version of that smoke-blowing the other day, by saying glibly no, it wasn’t fair, it was snark. Ugh.
This is 21st-century Security State America. We can lock you in prison without even bothering to charge you for a crime and nobody but a handful of bloggers will so much as make a peep about it.
This was editing with a deliberate attempt to deceive the public, an attempt to destroy the career of a dedicated public servant (an attempt which may yet succeed), and part of an on-going attempt to excise basic integrity from public discourse.
Poisonous, vile and corrosive.
And the way Sherrod was treated is just…appalling. I suppose that’s what’s fueling the outrage. She’s not John Kerry. She’s the Georgia director of the Department of Agriculture – I mean, she was. She was doing her damn job when someone at the White House phoned her while she was driving to an appointment, then phoned her again and told her to pull over and fired her. Because some malicious white guy told lies about her. Fucking hell.
Ophelia:
Ophelia:
No disagreement with your position, but after 5 years of Valerie Plame and 2 years of the Duke stripper case on the front page of the NY Times, my capacity for partisan outrage is diminished. For every Breitbart there’s an Olbermann. I think it’s the Law of Conservation of Idiots.
The big problem I think is the USDA, and to some degree the administration.
Some kook puts something on a website, and they (by Sherrod’s account at least) throw her under the bus, demand she resign immediately without getting the facts? What are these guys thinking? Decision by whim? If it’s on the internet it must be true? If they can’t stand up to legal principles against a kook, what can we expect them to do correctly when things are tough?
Partisan shmartisan. I have zero appetite for partisan outrage, it bores me rigid, but this is hardly just partisan outrage.
I get the Sherrod thread, and in fact it seems to have hit the public and will be “fixed” . Fixed? But the Acorn thing as set up is news to me. Will have to look that up.
The Acorn thing is also disgusting. Rachel Maddow did a good job of exposing that. It was a sting by a couple of right-wing shits posing as a prostitute and a pimp who tried to get an Acorn guy (in California somewhere I think…Fresno?) to help them with their enterprise and filmed it all with a hidden camera (which is illegal). All he did was ask some probing questions and then call a friend of his in the police department after the r.w. shits left – but the video was edited to make it look as if he were co-operating with them. Unbelievably sleazy – and Fucks News ran it and ran it and ran it and ran it.
On the plus side, the administration has now reversed its position and apologised.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/21/white-house-shirley-sherrod
We’re hearing plenty, and rightly so, about how disgusting it was to mislead with the context of the original remarks. To me, far more alarming than any forgery an opposition blogger might cook up, is the caving in to the insinuations before checking out the facts. That’s the really disgraceful part of this and I’m afraid that one effect of it will be to encourage people like Breitbart to cook up more of the same in an attempt to force hands before investigations. They’ve seen it works, so I’d be very surprised if we didn’t see a great deal more of it very soon.
Not that Acorn was squeaky clean
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/21/opinion/21pubed.html?_r=1