Joan Walsh on the dustup between her, Dean vs. Tweety today Breitbart

[RamboLiberal]

MSNBC's "Hardball" today might have seemed like a case of blind men describing an elephant, as host Chris Matthews, Gov. Howard Dean and I all appeared to have seen different Shirley Sherrod videos. And we wound up sparring over that (though Dean and I were on the same side), rather than the perfidy of Andrew Breitbart, on the day Shirley Sherrod announced her intention to sue Breitbart, the impresario of Big…Everything, but especially Big Propaganda, and a big, big smear of Shirley Sherrod.

It's too bad, because I think we could have had a good discussion otherwise (and Matthews and I did better in the second hour of the show.) The experience was a perfect case study of how Breitbart and the right wing noise machine manage to hijack the debate over race and politics in this country, even when they're wrong.

First, let me make one thing clear: According to Media Matters, and you all know they pay attention, Matthews was right about the first video posted by Breitbart. It did include Sherrod alluding to the epiphany she describes in detail later, about the fact that many issues aren't about black and white, they're about the haves and have nots. There are also versions of the video that don't include that quote. I had seen both versions; Dean had only seen those that didn't have the short allusion to her epiphany about the importance of "have nots" cooperating around economic issues.

But enough about that false issue: I went on "Hardball" Thursday to say, first of all, that if people who care about racial justice get sucked into debating the legal rights and wrongs of Shirley Sherrod's lawsuit, and exactly what the clearly truncated tape "revealed," we lose. I am not a lawyer, so all I can say is, Sherrod is a person who's been grievously wronged and defamed, who has a right to seek a remedy for an injustice. Lawyers can debate whether this is the correct way to do it. Dan Gillmor has a great post here.

http://www.salon.com/news/shirley_sherrod/?story=/opinion/walsh/politics/2010/07/29/the_wrong_lessons_of_the_sherrod_story