THE APOLOGY DERBY – AT 7:47 P.M. ET:  We can feel a legitimate sense of revulsion at the apology derby going on regarding Shirley Sherrod.  For those who've been on Mars the last few days, Shirley Sherrod is a Department of Agriculture officer who spoke before the NAACP and recounted her experiences with a white farmer.  At the start of the story, it appeared that she'd said and did racist things.  Later, the story turned out to be about racial reconciliation.

Initial reports of Sherrod's remarks stressed her seemingly anti-white comments.  She was ordered to resign by the Agriculture Department, apparently under pressure from a White House sensitive to charges of reverse racism.  The NAACP even denounced her.

When the full text of Sherrod's remarks surfaced, everyone went into damage-control mode, and the apologies started flowing.  Now the White House has apologized, and Sherrod will presumably be offered either her old job back, or a new one with Agriculture.

Garbage.

Yes, there was some early misinterpretation of her remarks, and the great Andrew Breitbart, who showed the edited video given to him, might have jumped the gun in publishing it.  But there are some facts here that need to come out:

1.  No matter what the intent of Sherrod's story, some of the language she used was inappropriate.  When she reported taking the white farmer to a lawyer "of his own kind,"
she was using language we just don't countenance today.  While that's probably not a cause for dismissal, it is a cause for reprimand.

2.  The NAACP says it was "snookered" by Fox News into denouncing Sherrod, but the record shows that the president of the organization was in attendance during her entire speech.  Presumably, he didn't think the "racial reconciliation" bit was all that important.

3.  Sherrod has made comments since her dismissal that are tasteless and require reprimand, like her comment to the ultra-liberal "Media Matters" that Fox News, which had carried the story, wants to see blacks returned to their original status in America, a blatant lie.

Once again we see the double standard at work.  Sherrod is African-American.  She may well have beern wronged by an initial interpretation of her remarks.  But now the apologies flow.

Where, though, are the apologies to the tea partiers, who were accused of racism by that same NAACP just last week?  Where is the apology from Congressman Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas, who accused the tea partiers of taking off the white sheets and putting on the tea party hats?  Where is the apology from media types and racial agitators who accused tea party members of shouting racial epithets at black members of Congress, when tapes of the incident in question show no such thing?

Where are those apologies?

The Rev. Jesse Jackson naturally weighed in, demanding an "apology" for Ms. Sherrod.  But it was Rev. Jackson who rushed down to Durham, North Carolina, to pour fuel on the fire when three white lacrosse players from Duke University were wrongly accused of raping an African-American exotic dancer.  When the truth came out, there was no apology from Rev. Jackson.

If Ms. Sherrod was wronged, she deserves to be made whole.  But our friends on the left might reflect on the racial politics now being played in order to energize the Democratic base.  And they might learn that apologies must sometimes be made by their self-righteous crowd, which tosses out terms like "racism" and "fascist" a little too freely.

July 21, 2010