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July 25, 2010
Birds of a Feather (Political)
As the Shirley Sherrod story began unfolding earlier in the week, I resisted the temptation to comment. For one thing, I was too busy; for another, it just seemed too bizarre: a highly unlikely scenario in which some of the usual suspects on the far Right had become ensnared in their own clumsy trap, an attempted smear of a mid-level black female bureaucrat as "racist" without checking the most basic facts: the incident upon which the claim was based was over twenty years old and had been not only misrepresented, but also lifted out of context by someone with a history of similar dirty tricks. Nevertheless, the “story” broke on Tuesday amidst an obviously coordinated flurry of excited announcements from the Limbaugh/O'Reilly/Beck chorus.It should have reminded others like myself who are old enough and still possessed of the requisite long term memory of Joe McCarthy’s desperate attempt to smear Army dentist Irving Peress just before the Senate hearings that brought the Wisconsin senator's noxious influence to an abrupt end in 1954.
Of course, the Guilt-by-Association similarity doesn’t end there; despite McCarthy’s public exposure as an incompetent alcoholic bully and his shockingly sudden death from liver failure at the ripe old age of 48, many still see him- not as a pathetic drunk and liar- but as a genuine American hero unfairly smeared by his political enemies.
That one of them is Cliff Kincaid, I regard as ample confirmation that my analysis is correct.
Doctor Tom
Posted by tjeffo at July 25, 2010 06:29 PM