Oops.

Remember Helen Thomas' retirement from Hearst Corporation back in June?

Remember Shirley Sherrod's forced resignation from USDA back in July?

Some writers are comparing these cases to the case of Juan Williams, with mixed results.

Parvez Ahmed writes:

Let us get one thing correct -- Helen Thomas, Rick Sanchez, Octavia Nasr and Juan Williams are neither racists nor bigots. By all accounts they are good journalists. But by expressing negative stereotypes about a racial or religious group they are guilty of breaching the ethics of fairness, crucial ingredients to succeed in journalism. Thus their forced resignation or firing from Hearst, CNN and NPR respectively is the right action. Having publicly expressed their biases they could no longer be viewed has having the credibility to be impartial arbiters of news.

In June, I wrote, "I invite anyone to explain to me why Thomas ought to have resigned for her comments." In fact, the title of my post was, "Helen Thomas lost her job for this?" Ahmed has given me the explanation I requested. I was emphasizing the fact that Thomas's speech was legitimately political and not bigoted. The comments that got Williams in trouble, on the other hand, were. So I believe that Williams' speech was worse than Thomas'. But Ahmed is right. As a journalist, Thomas ought to have been fired, and Hearst had every right to do so. I screwed up. Consistency demands that I admit my error here, and I do.

Slate's William Saletan compares Williams to Sherrod:

Three months ago, right-wingers clipped a video of Sherrod to make her look like a racist. They circulated the video on the Internet, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture fired her. 

Now it's happening again. This time, left-wingers have done the editing. They clipped a video of Juan Williams, a commentator for Fox News and NPR, to make him look like an anti-Muslim bigot. They circulated the video on the Internet, and last night, NPR fired him.

Saletan came out against the firing of Sherrod in July, and now he comes out against the firing of Williams. Saletan writes:

The damning video clip of Williams, like the damning clip of Sherrod, cuts off the speaker just as he's about to reverse course. According to the full transcript, immediately after saying, "I don't think there's any way to get away from these facts," Williams continues: "But I think there are people who want to somehow remind us all as President Bush did after 9/11, it's not a war against Islam." That continuation has been conveniently snipped from the excerpt.

If Williams is guilty of anything, according to Saletan, it is for expressing his fears. Saletan writes: 

But admitting such fears doesn't make you a bigot. Sometimes, to work through your fears, you have to face them honestly. You have to think through the perils of acting on those fears. And you have to explain to others why they, too, should transcend their anxieties or resentments and treat people as individuals.

That's what Shirley Sherrod did in her speech to the NAACP. It's what Juan Williams did in his interview on Fox News. 

There are significant differences between these two cases, however. 

• The irrational fears Sherrod confessed to having were fears she had many years ago; Williams confessed to having irrational fears now. 
• NPR was well within its rights to fire Williams; since Sherrod's bigoted actions occurred so long ago, it's not clear that USDA was justified in firing her. 
• It is abundantly clear that Sherrod is a reformed bigot; it is not so clear in the case of Williams. Everyone is familiar with the phenomenon of bigots taking back their bigotry in the same breath in which they express it. Williams appears to be a bigot in spite of himself. It may be that we're all bigots. But we are smart enough to combat our own bigotry, and we can certainly avoid expressing it in public. Universal bigotry is no excuse for bigotry. 

In addition, it's not clear that putting Williams' comment in context helps. Even if Williams recognizes the irrationality of his bigotry, as the rest of the segment suggests, that doesn't show that he is not a bigot. Saletan admits as much in his defense of him. Saletan denies that Williams' fears are bigoted, I know, but he is simply wrong about that. 

But the fact that Williams is a bigot is not, strictly speaking, the real problem here anyway. The problem is that Williams chose to express his bigotry in a public forum. He didn't have to work through his fears in front of who knows how many viewers of The O'Reilly Factor. As a journalist, he should have done that in private. No one had a gun to his head, and there was plenty of material from the preceding Talking Points segment to talk about without confessing to this or that irrational fear. 

I have a great amount of respect for Saletan and the high quality of his work for Slate. On this one rare occasion, unfortunately, he dropped the ball. We all do at some point. 

Strike three, asshole.

Andrew Breitbart has changed his tune. Again.

At first, he said the video of Shirley Sherrod was evidence that a Federal employee was preaching racism. It is now clear that Breitbart's allegation, repeated ad nauseam by Fox "News," is patently false. Then, he claimed that Sherrod's speech was an endorsement of racism, when in fact it was the very opposite. Now, Breitbart is claiming that the audience's reactions to Sherrod's speech is evidence of racism in the NAACP. But this new accusation is also patently false, as Slate's William Saletan shows. Read about it here.

Strike three, asshole.

In related news, Ann Coulter is coming to the defense of Breitbart. According to New York Daily News,

"The whole key to this story is that Andrew Breitbart was set up," the fiery right-wing writer told Sean Hannity on Fox News on Wednesday.

She argued that the conservative blogger was the victim of a "fraud" by the person who sent him the edited video.

"The person who sent the edited tape has to know what the full speech said," she argued, noting that Breitbart should "reveal his source."

"He was set up," Coulter said. "This was a fraud."

You see, for the conservative sleaze merchant, when liberals make mistakes, there is no excuse. But when conservatives make mistakes, someone else is always responsible. If Fox "News" and Breitbart want to be considered news organizations, they have to start acting like news organizations. Breitbart and Fox are ultimately responsible for what they publish and air and what they make of it. Had they been legitimate news organizations, the first question they would have asked upon seeing the edited video would have been, "Where is the rest of the video?" But they were so intent on defending the Tea Party against charges of racism and creating a shit storm among Democrats and the NAACP that they didn't. They didn't because Fox "News" and Breitbart are not news organizations. They have zero credibility, and Coulter's lame attempt to make an excuse for Breitbart simply advertises that lack of credibility.

Anyone who is still interested in what these right-wing hacks have to say is a dupe.

The sociopathic wing of the Republican Party does it again

Confused by the coverage of Shirley Sherrod's resignation from USDA and the reasons for it? Perhaps that's because the story was completely fabricated by Fox "News" and Andrew Breitbart and now you're trying to separate truth from fiction. Let Rachel Maddow help you sort it out.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

And if fabricating a story weren't bad enough, when the truth about Shirley Sherrod came out and it was revealed that Sherrod was not a racist working in the Obama administration but was rather a person who learned almost a quarter century ago that all the poor deserved her help, Fox "News" attacked the Obama admnistration for "railroading" an innocent person. This again proves that the people at Fox "News" and other assorted conservative thugs have a sociopathic disregard for the truth and that their only goal is to do whatever they can to bring down the Obama administration.

Everyone at the White House needs to grow a pair.  They must not capitulate to the reprehensible machinations of conservative thugs like Andrew Breitbart, Sean Hannity, and Megyn Kelly any longer. The gutless Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack actually asked for Sherrod's resignation before the truth about this smear could surface. This must end. Everyone working for President Obama must stand up to these thugs and make people see them for what they are.

Of course, they have done more than see to it that an innocent person lost her job. As a result of this deception, they have put Vilsack in an embarrassing position, they have turned Sherrod against the NAACP, and they have kept liberals occupied with this shit storm when they could have been talking about important issues, like jobs. It's all in a day's work for the sociopathic wing of the Republican party.

Update: William Saletan's piece for Slate on this mess is well worth reading.