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Does insanity from the right know no bounds?
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 defends his statements with more of the same.
“Certainly the image in my head of a lynching is rope around the neck. 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?”
Is this not typical of right-wing behavior? When criticized for making erroneous or misleading statements, they don’t back down. Instead they keep on attacking with all the vigor they can muster. So convinced are these people that the crusade they are on to destroy anything tainted with the evils of liberalism is a worthy one that even when faced with facts, they are able to justify their words and actions to their own supposed satisfaction.
Scary insane.
And just for the record, Sherrod used the term lynching correctly. A rope is not necessary for an act of murder to be considered a lynching.
“to seize somebody believed to have committed a crime and put him or her to death immediately and without trial, usually by hanging” -Encarta Dictionary
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This was so petty and ridiculous to have even written about. The RIGHT is so damn desperate in the their smear campaigns to find ANYTHING to bring someone down is unfreak’n believable!!!!!
Mario,
You picked a perfect picture….JACKASS, all of them!!!
I don’t think this one helps the Teabaggers’ position very much. To even want this event talked about more can only drive more people away from the insane group’s party. There’s another word for killing someone for the color of their skin, religion or ethnicity – GENOCIDE. Not any better …
This reminds me of the time in May of ’09 when the wingnut press and punditry jumped on the president for asking for spicy Dijon mustard on a cheeseburger (http://mediamatters.org/research/200905070031). If they don’t have an issue or a point they manufacture one.
I have a Scottish friend who is an engineer and travels widely in third world countries. In Sri Lanka he witnessed a few lynchings that consisted of placing a tire around the victims neck, dousing him with gasoline and burning him to death. These were “lynchings” of the most horrible kind.
Charlie, you may recognize the technique you mention as “necklacing”: made famous in apartheid South Africa in the early ’80′s, soon overshadowed by the “neck tie” (slicing the throat, and pulling out the tongue through the incision).
The good news?
Being “breitbarted” is right up there with being “Borked.”
Let’s keep the pressure on….
This entire situation reminds me of a quote by Eleanor Roosevelt, “Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.” The Mr Lord’s article about Ms Sherrod is the perfect example of small minds in action (or inaction, as the case may be). What was he hoping to accomplish by attacking the historic account of someone who had been brutally murdered on the level of a semanticist? By challenging Ms Sherrod’s account of the ‘lynching’ by virtue of his own ignorance surrounding the term only served to reinforce the growing mountain of evidence that exists to demonstrate that the ‘right’ make their judgements without first having fully analyzed and assessed the available information at their disposal. Had Mr Lord taken 2 minutes to Google the word ‘lynching’ and sought a definition for the word he claimed to understand before attempting to continue the assassination of Ms Sherrod begun with the release of the tainted tape he would have realized that the premise of his entire article was not merely wrong but glaringly fallacious.
Of course, proving one’s allegations before they are published requires that you are willing to take accountability for your work, that you are confident in the veracity of what you produce. The failure to do this, on the other hand, points to an intellectual laziness that is directly related to the type of thinking that led the United States economy to lose the surplus it had after the Clinton administration into the unpaid tax-breaks for the rich that have added trillions of dollars to the deficit – something the Republicans want to EXTEND (such forward thinking individuals), since cutting the amount of money coming IN will always stimulate your purse, right (WRONG).
It was a lynching – just as his article attempted to revive the assassination that failed when the full video was released (much to the chagrin of Mr Breitbart).
The truth: two words the ‘right’ doesn’t seem to think applies to them.