“… Eat the United States”.
A few weeks ago, there was this youtube video which was making the rounds. It was from some comedy troupe or show “The Whitest Kids You Know”, and it was a meta-commentary parody campaign ad for “Clint Webb for Senate”. Here it is — the first 30 seconds are extrenuous.
Now, skip to the 1:29 mark. “Here’s an unflattering picture of my opponent. Here’s a quote of his taken out of context.”
It’s a good “quote”, well done. What makes this punchline work is the meaninglessness of the quote. “… Eat the United States”. And with that, I have an easy short-hand for various character assassinations we see in the world of politics.
It’s interesting to see the shiftings for the Shirley Sherrod story when I go to “google blog” aggregator. What I’ve seen over the last couple of days is it at the top of the page, and at first conservative blogs dominated under Andrew Breitbart’s website. Next time I checked, liberal blogs were at the top. Then the next I checked, sure enough, the conservative counter-attack: Newsbusters (the media watch-blog that uncovers the Liberal Bias of Jay Leno monolouges) — using the phrase “Disgraced Shirley Sherrod Blames”. Today I look — almost 24 hours since I was last online — and see a pretty good balance. Mediate starts off two different story-trees here.
Beyond this story, the next story covered in blogoland — yesterday, Lindsey Lohan was next, today she’s not on the front page. The first Celebrity story is that Christina Applegate is Pregnant. Somehow I doubt this will have much staying power, and the next time I look it will not be there — perhaps Lohan will knock it down again.
I would like to think that Andrew Breitbart’s credibility is forever shaken, as with Fox News. But it should have been knocked away after ACORN — the problem here is that that story never got fully contextualized into public conciousness, and if you ask randomly to marginally politically aware public what happened with ACORN, they’d provide an answer full of falsities. Andrew Breitbart is arguably the driving force of the Republican Party at this precise moment in time.  You allow one thing to pass, you’ll get to the next thing — Tom Vilsack has itchy fingers.
Swerve a little bit further, and I see a little bit of argument that was bad about Shirley Sherrod’s comments — not the white / black thing, but the part where she confirms the “poor / rich” “Class Warfare”. So the Class Warfare continues, I suppose, as defined by Warren Buffet. There’s a bit of interesting things happening on that score in this political environment, maybe I’ll get to it.