truly appalling...

I don't have much to add to what has been said elsewhere. Jonathan Bernstein I think puts it best:  "Appalling. Disgusting. Awful." The knee-jerk speed with which Ms. Sherrod was let go points to an executive department that quivers in fear, unwilling to stand its ground on issues of race [1]. The possibility that the White House, as Greg Sargent notes, "will not lean on Vilsack to reinstate Sherrod," and that even having been given the opportunity to put things right chose instead to distance themselves from the entire matter, is deeply disappointing. 


I was, however, pleased to see Anderson Cooper come out swinging tonight. While stating that he'll let the viewer decide, it was clear that he was not willing to pull many punches in his coverage of Ms. Sherrod's firing, or the role of Andrew Breitbart in disseminating the video (although apparently he did not edit it). Even Glenn Beck was defending her, or at least suggesting that something was amiss (he did of course get in his jabs at the NAACP--"When was the last time the NAACP didn't give someone the benefit of the doubt right away who was African-American?")[2]. 


Ta-Nehisi Coates writes "I'll talk a bit later. In all honesty , I need to calm down.... I feel like the last week has radicalized me in the worst possible way." Until he does, probably the most insightful comments came from Breibart himself, who noted that "This was about the NAACP attacking the Tea Party and this [the video of Sherrod] is showing racism at an NAACP event." Breitbart was hoping for an excellent day, between this and the failed take-down of Spencer Ackerman. Did things go as planned? Ultimately I think they did, even if Ms. Sherrod gets her job back and despite Ackerman's holding onto his. The purpose was to draw blood, to create an atmosphere of fear, and to show anyone who was paying attention that the right has no qualms about fighting a bloody war of attrition on this issue. In a sense, the right has been doing what Spencer Ackerman suggested the left needed to do in the leaked Journolist emails: "What is necessary is to raise the cost on the right of going after the left. In other words, find a right winger’s [sic] and smash it through a plate-glass window. Take a snapshot of the bleeding mess and send it out in a Christmas card to let the right know that it needs to live in a state of constant fear. Obviously, I mean this rhetorically.”


This is not new politics, not by any means. But it is certainly ugly politics. It is slimy and vicious, zero-sum for the participants, and probably a negative sum for everybody else.


[1] Which I think is the exception, rather than the pattern for this administration. Obama has chosen his battles carefully for sure, but when engaged, the behavior of the administration has been better characterized by constancy of purpose rather than anxious, expedient and knee-jerk responses. Again, I think Bernstein said it best: "The White House, in my opinion, did an excellent job of handling these things last year, letting Van Jones go when something specific they were wise not to defend surfaced, but ignoring other attacks if they were based on phony smears.  This one doesn't fit the pattern."

[2] The answer? Far too damned often. The NAACP has been slow to recognize mass imprisonment as an important issue, with various local chapters supporting "martial law" and "zero-tolerance" policies that have been marked by problems of racial profiling.