Right Wing Character Assassination

When I was a kid the right wing loonies in the US were limited to the John Birch Society (except for the outbreak of Goldwater-itis in 1964 that quickly went down in flames in election defeat but permanently deformed the party as Richard Nixon followed the infamous Southern Strategy). But the right is rampant in the US as exemplified by the Tea Party crazies. Despite the catastrophe of the Reagan and two Bush admininstrations which have seen the destruction of the middle and working class while the rich have gotten more wealthy and entrenched than even during the infamous "Gilded Age", the right wing crazies continue to grow and put out their distorted and evil message.

The lastest, most outrageous example, is the character assassination of of Shirley Sherrod. The best presentation of what happened and the full pattern of vicious manipulation by right wing crazies -- abetted by the right wing media like Fox "News" and the other minions of the Rupert Murdoch empire -- was given by Rachel Maddow on MSNBC on Tuesday July 20:



Today -- July 21 -- you hear that the Obama Administration is "willing to reconsider" its firing of Sherrod. That is outrageous. The woman was lynched by a right wing mob. You don't then stand on the stump of the tree under the limp body and announce that you will now "reconsider" the guilt of the innocent party. You round up the lawful authorities and go after the scoundrels who destroyed a person's life. You don't just "offer back" a job to a person you drummed out of employment without any due process, you get down on your knees and beg for forgiveness, you offer financial compensation, you publicly ask what you can do to right this terrible wrong. You don't pretend that this was just an "admininstrative slip-up". This was wrong, wrong, wrong.

As Rachel Maddow points out, the right wing crazies have done this over and over and the idiot Obama administration keeps falling for these trumped up "charges" and character assassinations. There is evil afoot in America and people need to know about it and arm themselves against these vicious right wing nuts who would destroy everything to achieve their fanatical ideological "goal". These fanatics echo the crazy thinking behind that wasteful and morally destructive war, the Vietnam war (from Wikipedia):

As James Witz noted, Tet "contradicted the claims of progress... made by the Johnson administration and the military." The Tet Offensive was the turning point in America's involvement in the Vietnam War. It had a profound impact on domestic support for the conflict. The offensive constituted an intelligence failure on the scale of Pearl Harbor. Journalist Peter Arnett quoted an unnamed officer, saying of Bến Tre (laid to rubble by US firepower) that "it became necessary to destroy the village in order to save it" (though the authenticity of this quote is disputed). According to one source, this quote was attributed to Major Booris of 9th Infantry Division.

These right wing crazies are willing to destroy America in order to "save it". They are nuts. They are dangerous.

Addendum: Here is another segment from the Rachel Maddow show discussion how a civil rights group -- NAACP -- itself fell victim to the racist slander of a right wing Tea Party activist -- Andrew Breitbart -- and Fox "News":



You would think that a country like the US with its long history of racism would have learned a lesson: don't take things at face value, investigate before you persecute, don't destroy people for what you think they are but take the time to really know who they are before you act. Sadly, that simple lesson hasn't been learned in the 220+ year history of the United States. All the words of Benjamin Jealous, head of NAACP, about "digging deep" and getting access to evidence -- after a rush to judgement the assassinated the character of a good person -- are tragic. On the other hand, the confession by him that the NAACP had been snookered by the right wing fanatics is a good statement. People need to learn how really ugly the political manipulation truly is. There is a very important lesson for Americans to learn from this tragedy.

Update 2010jun21: Keith Olbermann's commentary is spot on. Obama should listen to this and act on it: