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crossposted on Holy Bullies and Headless Monsters
I thought I had seen it all when it comes to the Shirley Sherrod debacle.
At first the incident was an embarrassment for the Obama Administration and the NAACP, but apparently members of the right are getting jealous. Some are obviously trying to outdo both parties in terms of humiliating themselves:
From Talking Points Memo comes this:
On Monday, former Reagan administration official Jeffrey Lord astonished the left and the right by penning an article in the conservative American Spectator attacking former-USDA official Shirley Sherrod for using the term “lynching” to describe the murder of one of her relative years ago. The problem, according to Lord, was that the victim, Bobby Hall was beaten to death by a blackjack, rather than being hanged by the neck. “It's…possible that she knew the truth and chose to embellish it, changing a brutal and fatal beating to a lynching.”
Critics, even at his own magazine, pounced, noting that a lynching is an extrajudicial murder by a mob, whether or not the weapon of choice is a rope.
Lord was referring to the story Sherrod told about the murder of her relatives in the infamous speech which was truncated to make it seem as if she was a racist:
I should tell you a little about Baker County. In case you don't know where it is, it's located less than 20 miles southwest of Albany. Now, there were two sheriffs from Baker County that — whose names you probably never heard but I know in the case of one, the thing he did many, many years ago still affect us today. And that sheriff was Claude Screws. Claude Screws lynched a black man. And this was at the beginning of the 40s. And the strange thing back then was an all-white federal jury convicted him not of murder but of depriving Bobby Hall — and I should say that Bobby Hall was a relative — depriving him of his civil rights.
Because of the criticism his piece received from both the left and the right, Lord goes farther in his criticism of Sherrod:
. . . Lord later expanded his critique of Sherrod by arguing that Hall wasn't beaten to death by enough people to constituted a mob, and therefore it couldn't have been a lynching in two different ways. He stands by that assessment.
“Certainly the image in my head of a lynching is rope around the neck,” Lord told me. “And when we really got into this, it was quite apparent to me that there was all sorts of other things. That there has to be a mob — mob action. Well what is a mob? Is it two people? Is it three people?”
Unbelievable. I have always believed that electing a black man as president would bring all sorts of strange people out of the woodwork.
And here is Jeffery Lord bending over backwards to prove my point.
Give it another week and they will be saying that Sherrod isn't an African-American.
Related posts:
Fox News admits mistake in pushing Sherrod story
360 degree turn – Now the right is attacking Shirley Sherrod for calling Breitbart a racist
Andrew Breitbart – the NAACP's best friend and the Tea Party Movement's worst enemy
10 Comments
How many IS a mob?Personally, I’d say that enough people to illegally overcome someone and beat them to death counts as a mob. It might be odd to speak that way about two people, but if that’s the part of the story he has the biggest problem with…
Seriously, even if the technical definition of lynching WAS a group of 20 or more extrajudicially hanging someone, as quoted, her story doesn’t significantly hinge on how her relative was killed.
“…..changing a brutal and fatal beating into a lynching…” Led by a sheriff, who got off. Yeah, the lack of rope is the real point of the story.
The point of the idea of lynching is people “taking the law into their own hands” (whether they have any validity to their charges or not). That’s why mob hits or gang violence wouldn’t be in the same category.
Oh, pass the popcorn pleaseThese people just aren’t content with the fact that the Obama Administration, in a way, made asshats out of themselves with the Sherrod incident.
They are determined to out-asshat the Administration and I vote that we continue to let them do it…
Really…
WTFYes being beaten to death with a blackjack is so much more civil and peaceful way to be murdered. How dare she claim that a murder based on race wasn’t civil and a pleasant way to be murdered. WTF with these rightwing nuts?
Does Uncle Clarence get a pass–for calling his congressional questioning for the Supremes “a High-Tech lynching”?
Hell no!And I personally hate it when any black politician pulls that lynching word and uses it as political rhetoric.
I hated it when Uncle Clarence (of all people) used it.
I hated it when Bobby Rush did it.
He should have argued the whole Roland Burris appointment on the merits of the case; that appointment had nothing to do with a “lynching.”
It turned me off of Burris (moreso than I was already turned off).
I hate it when black politicians do that.
Here’s a bill proposed that never passed..Here’s the definition of lynching as described in the 1922 anti-lynching bill introduced by Republican Rep. L.C. Dyer that Lord pretends to know something about:
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That the phrase “mob or riotous assemblage,” when used in this act, shall mean an assemblage composed of three or more persons acting in concert for the purpose of depriving any person of his life without authority of law as a punishment for or to prevent the commission of some actual or supposed public offense.
So it was proposed that the legal definition be 3 or more people. So a very small “mob”.
Dictionary def of “mob” is basically- 1)large crowd of people, 2) the populace at large, 3) organized crime, and 4) Loosely organized group
Exact numbers are left to the beholder, but if I were alone and a couple people started beating me to death, I’d certainly feel like they were a whole mob. He’s basing his criticism on his personal perception of what a lynching “should” entail. I figure the lynchee is entitled to the same criteria of definition, at least in the moments before they die.
When they beat us to death,and drag us behind their trucks down dirt roads, and taser us to death, and whatever other sick and twisted evil they can think up, is not “lynching” as long as it doesn’t involve a rope. What rubbish.
I wonder, will Obama apologize and invite Sherrod to the White House to talk about this over a few beers? I know, shes not a cop and all but it would be a nice gesture.
Has he fired whoever it was in his adminstration that originated the calumnies against Sherrod?
Shirley’s got better things to do that quaff a brew with BarryShe’s going to rip off Breitbart’s head and shit down his neck — legally speaking of course
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