But I don't need to: FoxNews.com actually bragged about having already hyped the story in a follow-up, after Sherrod was forced to quit. "The Agriculture Department announced Monday, shortly after FoxNews.com published its initial report on the video, that Sherrod had resigned." Likewise, Bill O'Reilly taped his performance, calling for Sherrod to resign, before she did so; the fact that the resignation had been reported by the time O'Reilly aired (he can't be bothered to work live at 8, like his competitors do? Poor guy) is meaningless.

But even after Sherrod was gone from USDA, Fox continued to hype Breitbart's false story. (As you can imagine, anti-racist activists Sean Hannity and Newt Gingrich had a ball with it that night!) Then CNN and the Atlanta Journal Constitution discovered and disseminated the truth early Tuesday; Fox anchors were blathering about Sherrod's "racism." By Wednesday, Fox had ignored its own role peddling lies, and turned the Sherrod story into a problem for President Obama. How unusual for Roger Ailes' non-news organization.

Matt Lewis of Politics Daily got the job of defending Breitbart on CNN today; you can judge for yourself how well he did in the clip below. Lewis had already run a glowing interview with Breitbart this week; it ended with a breathless "Anything else you want folks to know about Andrew Breitbart?" as though he was talking to some young boy-band star who's new to national attention. And in a segment devoted to checking facts before you report them, Lewis tried to diminish my arguments by claiming I was doing the show from "Netroots Nation" in Las Vegas. Um, I've never been to that great lefty blogosphere convening; maybe next year. I was home. The attempted slur was silly.

The most important point is this: Fox News has, sadly, become the purveyor of a 50-state "Southern strategy," the plan perfected by Richard Nixon to use race to scare Southern Democrats into becoming Republicans by insisting the other party wasn't merely trying to fight racism, but give blacks advantages over whites (Fox News boss Roger Ailes, of course, famously worked for Nixon). Now Fox is using the election of our first black president to scare (mainly older) white people in all 50 states that, again, the Democratic Party is run by corrupt black people trying to give blacks advantages over whites (MSNBC's Rachel Maddow laid out this history last week).

Consider four of the biggest stories the network has peddled since Obama entered the White House:

• Glenn Beck and others went after "green jobs czar" Van Jones, an African-American, false claiming Jones signed a 9/11 "Truther" petition, correctly noting he'd said some not-nice things about Republicans. Jones resigned.
• Then the big story was ACORN, the community-organizing group run by a black woman, Bertha Lewis, and known for working in low-income black communities. First, remember, ACORN allegedly committed voter fraud in the 2008 election (in fact, the voter registration problems at ACORN were self-reported, and the fraud was on ACORN, because they paid some scam-artist workers to register voters that ultimately didn't exist – and thus wouldn't vote). Then Fox hyped the big Breitbart video lie: that James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles went into various ACORN offices dressed outlandishly as pimp and prostitute, and got advice on how to beat taxes and set up a child prostitution ring. In fact, once law enforcement officials began examining those charges, they found they were false. Fox owner Rupert Murdoch's New York Post even had to headline its story: "ACORN set up by vidiots: DA."
• More recently, Fox has been pushing the story of how the Obama administration protected the New Black Panther Party from charges of voter intimidation, stemming from complaints by three Republican poll workers that the "Panthers" were intimidating mainly black voters in Philadelphia in 2008. No intimidated voters were ever found, and conservative Abigail Thernstrom blasted other GOP members of the U.S Civil Rights Commission for trying to use the non-story to "topple" Obama.
• Then came Shirley Sherrod. I have no doubt that, if CNN hadn't found Roger and Eloise Spooner, the white farmers helped by Sherrod, Fox would have peddled Breitbart's lies all week, to further its paranoid and politically driven narrative that Obama is a "racist" who's out to oppress white folks as "reparations" for the centuries of discrimination blacks have endured.  It's crazy, sure, but Ailes worked for Richard Nixon, who pioneered the "Southern strategy."

Remember that Pat Buchanan has compared the Tea Partiers to "George Wallace voters," and bragged that he won them over to Nixon. Buchanan and Ailes are trying to do it again, and having a black Democrat in the White House makes them think it will be even easier this time.

Honestly, it won't be easier. There are too many people of every race who are genuinely not racist, or open to naked racial appeals. I truly believe the vast majority of American voters will judge Obama on his accomplishments or lack thereof in 2012, not the color of his skin. But older white voters scared by social change are a small but reliable base for Ailes and Buchanan to rely on.

Finally, host Howard Kurtz and poor Matt Lewis ended the segment talking about how Sherrod has now gone too far, calling Fox and Breitbart "racist." I defended Sherrod, and Lewis (and now Brent Bozell's minions at Newsbusters!) claimed I was arguing Sherrod should get a pass to say whatever she likes about race, because her father was murdered by a white man, who was exonerated by white Georgia justice.

Watch the video for yourself, and see what I said. First of all, the idea that any journalist is wasting his or her time policing Shirley Sherrod's rhetoric on race, after what she's been through, is absurd. But what I said was, I think her charges of racism by Fox and Breitbart are justified. Both are peddling a false story of all the nonexistent ways white people are hurt and/or oppressed by blacks; in particular, our black president. In my book, that's racist; others may disagree. I didn't give Sherrod carte blanche to peddle hatred of white people (not that she would if I gave it to her).

It's not my job, either way. Fox and Breitbart are far more powerful, and dangerous, than Shirley Sherrod. They should be ashamed of themselves, but they're shameless.

 

But when it comes to the Sherrods, it's hard to detach my deep sadness about American politics from my disgust at the media. (You can watch my discussion at both on MSNBC's "The Ed Show" at the end of this post.) I'd like to get a few observations about politics out of my system, letting me focus on media tomorrow morning.

I have found myself saying to many people this week, black and white people, that I'm surprised President Obama didn't have someone close to him who recognized the Sherrod name right away, especially in the context of Georgia – at least the name of Shirley's husband, Charles, a major figure in the civil rights movement, if not Shirley herself, a long-time civil rights and agricultural reform leader.

But I was sad to read Maureen Dowd's column in the New York Times tonight, even though she seems to agree with me. Dowd, who pretends to be liberal, needles Obama in her column by suggesting that Bill Clinton would have known the Sherrods, and thus would have acted more responsibly.

Let me just point to a couple of ways Dowd is wrong – morally wrong. I’m not sure about factually.

First of all, Dowd has savaged Bill Clinton at every opportunity since early in his presidency. She never missed an chance to trash Hillary Clinton in the 2008 primaries. She wasn't terribly kind to Obama, either, naming him "Obambi" and regularly questioning his manhood, but there's no doubt the Clintons drew the worst of her venom. So to see Dowd use Bill Clinton's racial bona fides to attack our first black president just shows what Obama is up against. Even supposed "liberals" are gunning for him now, and they're shooting garbage.

But Dowd's column also reminds me why I thought it was so wrong for so many Democrats to tar the Clintons as racist in 2008. She quotes South Carolina Rep. James Clyburn, perhaps the first major Obama supporter to accuse the Clintons of playing the so-called race card, excoriating Obama and his administration for not knowing about the Sherrods. “He needs some black people around him.”

Wow. With all due respect, Rep. Clyburn, I'd like to urge you to edit your statement to Dowd. I think perhaps you meant to say that Obama needs "some people around him" who know the heroes and the lessons of the civil rights movement, whatever their race. I would argue that the most important moral heroes in this story, behind the Sherrods, are Roger and Eloise Spooner, the white farm couple Shirley Sherrod told her story about -- ultimately she helped them save their farm -- and they came forward to tell CNN about it. When I called Taylor Branch, the great historian of the civil rights movement, he told me he knew immediately who Sherrod was when he heard the news: "I said, 'Oh my God, it's Shirley Sherrod?' She is such a gem, and he [Charles] is such a gem," and Branch spoke from memory about the bravery and importance of both of them. Branch is also white.

It's clear that there are white people who know and honor the Sherrods' work, and black people who apparently don't. Why go to race, Rep. Clyburn, when it's a black president whose administration disrespected these fine black people?

Also: And why go to Maureen Dowd, who never misses a chance to cheap-shot a Democratic president? Even if, to do so, she has to champion the one she's cheap-shotted the most, Bill Clinton. There are a lot of political lessons for Democrats in the Sherrod scandal, but I'll try to keep my focus on the media on Sunday.

Here's the MSNBC video:

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

 

 

 

Despite Breitbart's attempt to cast Shirley Sherrod as The, um, Man ("The Woman" doesn't have the same ring), out to keep oppressed white folk down, under our first black racist president, she turned out to be the opposite, an advocate of justice for everybody. Given that history, it's fascinating to learn more about her husband, an early SNCC leader known for being willing to work with white volunteers even after tension developed over the role of whites in the organization. Charles Sherrod is important for much more than the fairness with which he treated whites, but given Breitbart's attempt to make his wife the poster woman for black "racism," that footnote to his leadership history is particularly noteworthy. If there's anyone more clueless about our civil rights history than Breitbart, as well as more abusive to it, I'm challenged to think of who it might be. He tests my commitment to nonviolent social change, but I'll share the work of Charles Sherrod to remember my values.

Sherrod was SNCC's first field secretary, and he co-founded the Albany movement after a student sit-in at the local bus station (to test a recently enacted desegregation law) led to a years-long campaign that ultimately involved Martin Luther King Jr. and the intervention of President John F. Kennedy. He traveled to the historic (and almost all-white) 1964 Democratic National Convention, when the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party fought for more black representation. He was jailed several times and stayed with SNCC until 1966, when Stokely Carmichael became chair and whites were expelled, but he'd already become more focused on his work in southwest Georgia than SNCC politics. Sherrod got his doctor of divinity degree from New York's Union Theological Seminary, then returned to Albany to found the Southwest Georgia Independent Voters Project, then the agricultural cooperative New Communities Inc. He served 14 years on the Albany City Council, and he still lives there, known to civil rights movement veterans but obscure to the wider world, until his wife was attacked by the ignorant bullies of the right.

"We tend to think of civil rights workers as people who, it was an episode in their life before they went on and did something else," says Clayborne Carson, SNCC historian and director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford. "But Sherrod is an exemplar of those people who didn't leave the movement. They stayed, and they're still fighting, to this day." (I tried to reach Sherrod for this story, but not surprisingly, the voice-mail boxes I got to were full.)

I'm a little embarrassed I didn't immediately recognize Sherrod's name, because he's an important figure in one of my favorite books, "Parting the Waters," the first volume in Taylor Branch's majestic trilogy, "America in the King Years." Of course, I read it when it came out, about 21 years ago, and Sherrod is only mentioned twice in the final volume, "At Canaan's Edge," which I finished around the time of the Obama election. I lent out my copy of "Parting the Waters" and never got it back (if you have it, return it!), so I tracked down Taylor Branch himself, and rather unbelievably, he reached over to a bookshelf and read the most important sections about Sherrod, over the phone.

But first, I asked Branch to tell me why Sherrod was such an important figure in the early days of the modern civil rights movement.

"Well, you know, he's still alive," Branch noted, since I seemed to be speaking in the past tense. (I knew he was still living, because Jonathan Capehart wrote about meeting him Thursday morning, accompanying his wife to MSNBC, and then driving to an interview at CNN. But neither show interviewed Charles Sherrod; no one seems to have realized his history.) Branch and Sherrod saw each other back in April, at SNCC's 50th anniversary celebration.

"He's an amazingly humble, persistent, thoughtful, stubborn and brave individual," Branch said. "You know, I mention [Mississippi SNCC leader] Bob Moses about 100 times in the book, and I consider him a truly historical figure. But Sherrod is up there, he's mentioned about 20 times." Carson likewise compared Sherrod to Moses. "He's as central to the struggle for voting rights as Moses was; the difference is, the movement turning point wasn't southwest Georgia, it was Mississippi. History is strange that way."

I asked Branch what he remembered best about Sherrod. He chuckled and read me a passage from the book about the jailing of hundreds of Freedom Riders in Mississippi in 1961, and a meeting that Sherrod, SNCC leader Diane Nash, and others had with Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, to ask for his help. The two young activists were unaware that Kennedy had already cut a deal with Mississippi Gov. Ross Barnett : If cops didn't beat up the protesters, the U.S. government would stay out of the way as they arrested them. As many as 600 Freedom Riders, most of them kids, were locked up in Parchman Penitentiary, Branch recalled, when Nash and Sherrod met with Kennedy and his assistant Burke Marshall.

Kennedy took the administration's line at the time: Why didn't the protesters drop their pesky Freedom Rides and get involved in voter registration — a constructive way to advance civil rights but also, of course, to register more Democrats. Sherrod exploded at Kennedy: "You are a public official, sir! It is not your job, before God or under the law, to tell us how to honor our constitutional rights. It's your job to protect us when we do." Branch laughed: "He does have a fiery side, but he was also, deeply, genuinely religious."

I was trying to find a neat morality tale match up between Shirley Sherrod's ultimate kindness to the white farmers she first resisted helping, and Charles Sherrod's role working with white volunteers in SNCC. Both Branch and Carson warned me about overstating that dimension of his story. "Sherrod would work with anybody," Branch said. "It's not right to say he went out of his way to work with white volunteers — but when they showed up in Atlanta, and people phoned around to find some place they could work, he'd take them." Reservations about working with whites weren't only about "black power," Branch noted. "They were a lot harder to supervise, and they stood out and could draw danger to themselves and other people." By the time of the big SNCC explosion that led to Carmichael's leadership and the expulsion of whites, "Sherrod was pretty far away from the ideological side. He's five years in Albany and caught up there," Branch says.

Still, it's worth noting that in one of the sadder internal battles of the civil rights movement, Sherrod was on the right side, standing up to heat for his use of white students in the Albany movement as early as 1964, according to Branch's "Pillar of Fire." The Sherrods are two for two: Given the chance to choose retaliation against whites and a kind of black separatism (which might even be understandable given the white racism they both endured growing up in the Jim Crow South), both chose to side with decency to white people.

Taylor Branch hopes the ugly treatment of Shirley Sherrod has the unintended positive consequence of "adding some context about a truly remarkable couple." Branch was sequestered in a Philadelphia library, researching his next book, and emerged to see headlines about some squabble over a USDA official. He read the story: "I said, 'Oh my God, it's Shirley Sherrod?' She is such a gem, and he is such a gem. We should really be listening to what she has to say."

Clay Carson agrees, but he couldn't resist voicing disappointment in President Obama for the administration's rapid dismissal of Shirley Sherrod before all the facts were in. "This is a symbol of something much larger: On civil liberties issues, he's just lost it. Nobody should ever be dismissed from a position for something they're saying on Fox. As a matter of principle, you don't fire someone without some kind of internal due process and investigation. But this is an administration that can order the assassination of an American citizen. It's disappointing, to say the least."

If I get a chance to talk to Charles Sherrod, I'll let him tell you what he thinks, in his own words, here.

Hayes first composed his piece as an e-mail and then decided (in the spirit of not trying to make us into another left-wing cabal colluding on media coverage!) to publish it. He also took issue with my calling his posts about Wright on Journolist "feverish" -- I stand by that one. But I think his overall point is fair: I was a little feverish in making Hayes the poster boy for the excesses of lefty Obama defenders during the 2008 primaries, and I apologize. My inner Andrew Breitbart came out. We disagreed, and still disagree, on the importance of the Wright mess, but as I said in the post, he was not the most militant Obama avenger of that sad era, and I could have been more judicious in my language.

Shirley Sherrod isn't a victim, she's a hero, and she said in a few short paragraphs what I've been trying to say for my whole career. Here it is. (There are reports the USDA is reconsidering her firing, but nothing confirmed yet.)

For context, Breitbart ended his video beatdown of Sherrod with this quote:

"That's when it was revealed to me that y'all, it's about poor versus those who have, and not so much about white -- it is about white and black, but it's not -- you know, it opened my eyes, 'cause I took him to one of his own ..."

But here's the whole story.

... 'cause I took him to one of his own and I put him in his hands, and said, OK, I've done my job. But, during that time, we would have these injunctions against the Department of Agriculture and -- so, they couldn't foreclose on him. And I want you to know that the county supervisor had done something to him that I have not seen yet that they've done to any other farmer, black or white. And what they did to him caused him to not be able to file Chapter 12 bankruptcy.

So, everything was going along fine -- I'm thinking he's being taken care of by the white lawyer, then they lift the injunction against USDA in May of '87 for two weeks and he was one of 13 farmers in Georgia who received a foreclosure notice. He called me. I said, well, go on and make an appointment at the lawyer. Let me know when it is and I'll meet you there.

So we met at the lawyer's office on the day they had given him. And this lawyer sat there -- he had been paying this lawyer, y'all. That's what got me. He had been paying the lawyer since November, and this was May. And the lawyer sat there and looked at him and said, "Well, y'all are getting old. Why don't you just let the farm go?" I could not believe he said that, so I said to the lawyer -- I told him, I can't believe you said that. I said: It's obvious to me that he cannot file a Chapter 12 bankruptcy to stop this foreclose, you have to file an 11. And the lawyer said to me, I'll do whatever you say -- whatever you think -- that's the way he put it. But he's paying him. He wasn't paying me any money. You know, so he said -- the lawyer said he would work on it.

And then, about seven days before that man would have been sold at the courthouse steps, the farmer called me and said the lawyer wasn't doing anything. And that's when I spent time there in my office calling everybody I could think so to try to see -- help me find the lawyer who would handle this. And finally, I remembered that I had gone to see one just 40 miles away in Americus with the black farmers. So, I --

[tape change]

SHERROD: Well, working with him made me see that it's really about those who have versus those who don't.

AUDIENCE: That's right.

SHERROD: You know, and they could be black, and they could be white, they could be Hispanic. And it made me realize then that I needed to work to help poor people -- those who don't have access the way others have.

I want to just share something with you and I think it helps to -- you know, when I learned this, I'm like, oh, my goodness. You know, back in the late 17th and 18th century, black -- there were black indentured servants and white indentured servants, and they all would work for seven years and get their freedom. And they didn't see any difference in each other -- nobody worried about skin color. They married each other. You know, these were poor whites and poor blacks in the same boat, except they were slaves, but they were both slaves and both had their opportunity to work out on the slavery.

But then they started looking at the injustices that they faced and started then trying -- you know, the people with money -- you know, they started -- the poor whites and poor blacks -- they -- you know, they married each other. They lived together. They were just like we would be. And they started looking at what was happening to them and decided we need to do something about it -- you know, about this. Well, the people with money, the elite, decided, hey, we need to do something here to divide them.

So that's when they made black people servants for life. That's when the put laws in place forbidding them to marry each other. That's when they created the racism that we know of today. They did it to keep us divided. And they -- it started working so well, they said, gosh, looks like we've come up on something here that can last generations -- and here we are. Over 400 years later, and it's still working. What we have to do is get that out of our heads. There is no difference between us.

The only difference is that the folks with money want to stay in power and whether it's health care or whatever it is, they'll do what they need to do to keep that power.

[APPLAUSE]

[...]

[25:03] SHERROD: I couldn't say 45 years ago, I couldn't stand here and say what I'm saying -- what I will say to you tonight. Like I told, God helped me to see that its not just about black people, it's about poor people. And I've come a long way. I knew that I couldn't live with hate, you know. As my mother has said to so many, if we had tried to live with hate in our hearts, we'd probably be dead now.

But I've come to realize that we have to work together and -- you know, it's sad that we don't have a room full of white and blacks here tonight 'cause we have to overcome the divisions that we have. We have to get to the point as Toni Morrison said race exists but it doesn't matter. We have to work just as hard -- I know it's -- you know, that division is still here, but our communities are not going to thrive -- you know, our children won't have the communities that they need to be able to stay in and live in and have a good life if we can't figure this out, you all. White people, black people, Hispanic people, we all have to do our part to make our communities a safe place, a healthy place, a good environment.

Today a big Breitbart "scoop" blew up in his angry face, when it was shown that the Big Journalism proprietor selectively edited a clip of an African-American USDA official seeming to admit she treated a white farmer poorly out of her own racial bias. It turns out that Shirley Sherrod was actually telling the story to show how the issue of race often obscures the issue of class, and the fact that poor black farmers and poor white farmers had a lot in common (eventually, she helped and became close to the white farmer and his family) — but Breitbart left all of that out of the video (just as he selectively and unfairly edited his cartoonish ACORN tapes).

Unbelievably, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack fired Sherrod based on Breitbart's creative editing, which left out Sherrod's real point (and in fact, accused her of making the opposite point) and also made it seem as though she was talking about something she did while working for the USDA, when the experience in question took place 24 years ago, when she worked for a nonprofit. If Vilsack doesn't hire Sherrod back, I will personally contribute to her legal fund.

Sorry, that's a long but important digression before addressing the story at hand: Carlson's similar dishonesty, in selectively releasing e-mails from the now-notorious Journolist for a story breathlessly headlined: "Documents show media plotting to kill stories about Rev. Jeremiah Wright." Alex Pareene got the basics right, in a War Room post: "Journolist Scandal: Liberals Planned Open Letter."

That's really all that happened. Or try this, if you want a little more detail: A handful of liberal opinion writers for openly liberal publications used the so-called Journolist to draft an open letter to ABC News, complaining about its moderation of an April 2008 debate between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama (questions about Wright were only one issue raised in the open letter, which ran in the Nation, but I'll go back to that). Later on that same list, the Daily Caller "reveals," after Wright ran amok at the National Press Club and an NAACP event (and Obama had to denounce him), some of the same liberals argued that liberal media outlets should ignore the controversy and attack conservatives who raised it. Other liberals disagreed with them. End of story.

Or it should be, except the fact-challenged Sarah Palin has picked up her bullhorn to blast the Caller's "scoop" on Twitter: "Media Bias? What Media Bias? BOMBSHELL!" and to claim that it validated her complaints about the "lamestream media" on Facebook. (So far, she hasn't asked any specific media outlet to refudiate the story.) I anticipate coverage from big MSM outlets any minute now, given that the Washington Post's Andy Alexander and the New York Times' Bill Keller are already on record flagellating their news organizations for ignoring earlier right-wing scalp-taking stories about ACORN, Van Jones and New Black Panther Party.

Andy, Bill, other possibly cowed-by-the-right mainstream journalists? Save your resources for real stories, and let me break down the Caller scoop for you.

1) Although the Caller claims that "employees of news organizations including Time, Politico, the Huffington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Guardian, Salon and the New Republic participated in outpourings of anger over how Obama had been treated in the media, and in some cases plotted to fix the damage" (emphasis mine), it only quotes a handful of people, and none of them are employed at anything other than liberal publications. (Thomas Schaller, credited with the idea for the open letter, is an author, a University of Maryland professor and an Op-Ed writer at the Baltimore Sun who periodically contributes to Salon, and more recently, 538.com.) The two people who come off as the most combative Obama zealots are Chris Hayes, who works at the Nation, and Spencer Ackerman, employed by the Washington Independent, both progressive publications. I assume if there had been any evidence that a mainstream media news reporter had colluded in the Journolist "plot" to defend Obama, he or she would have been outed immediately by the Caller. My sources say there weren't any.

2) In fact, the Journolist should have been named "the liberal economists, academics, foundation execs, PR folks, think tankers, pundits and other pals of Ezra Klein" list (the American Prospect blogger, now Washington Post blogger, convened Journolist). Although I was never on the list (more about that later) by all accounts of it I've heard, liberal opinion makers from the worlds of think tanks, academia and progressive punditry outnumbered mainstream media news reporters by dozens to one.

3) The Caller also falsely claims that later, when Wright showed himself to be not merely a guy who made some nasty anti-America and anti-white people comments, but a kook and a narcissist, and Obama denounced him, the Journolist plotted to "kill stories" about it and also to malign conservatives like Fred Barnes and Karl Rove who were trying to make Wright an issue as "racists" — and no one challenged those ideas, except on tactical grounds. In fact, if you read the story, you'll see that several people are quoted strongly disagreeing with the feverish suggestions of Hayes and Ackerman, on grounds that were moral and factual, not merely tactical. Hayes himself told the Caller, correctly: "I can say ‘hey I don’t think you guys should cover this,’ but no one listened to me."

4) Beyond the bounds of the Journolist, the Caller strives mightily to make the case that there was a generalized liberal media conspiracy to ignore the Wright issue — but I can tell you from personal experience, there was none. Just check the archives of Salon. It's true that there were a lot of Obama supporters who tried to argue the Wright story was less important than Obama's stance on Iraq and other issues. There were plenty of us who thought it was our job to pay attention to the Wright mess. (Read Joe Conason's take, here.) I raised questions about the anti-ABC letter at the time it was published. There was, and is, no party line among progressives.

Despite the hysterical headline, the Caller story has nothing to tell us about the "media." It does, however, have a little bit to remind us about the American progressive movement in 2008. I'd argue it might give the left some important rearview-mirror insight. I admit it: Reading the Caller story, and the way some individuals revered Obama, brought back a little bit of my PTSD as someone who defended Hillary Clinton from progressive attacks and questioned the reflexive anointing of Obama as the candidate of the left. The same Chris Hayes who the Caller says "castigated his fellow liberals for criticizing Wright" ("All this hand wringing about just how awful and odious Rev. Wright remarks are just keeps the hustle going. Our country disappears people. It tortures people. It has the blood of as many as one million Iraqi civilians — men, women, children, the infirmed — on its hands. You’ll forgive me if I just can’t quite dredge up the requisite amount of outrage over Barack Obama’s pastor,” Hayes wrote) now regularly castigates the predictably centrist Obama, including last night on MSNBC's "Countdown."

The Obama-worship of progressives like Hayes and many others on the Journolist, as commemorated by the Caller, set them up for a big fall, so that now they're often unrealistically critical of the president (I now get attacked for defending Obama too much. Let me also say: I like Hayes, and he's not the worst offender here.) It also contributed to Obama and his team feeling confident that they can neglect, even occasionally kick, his progressive base with impunity. Unfortunately, they never had to fight for it.

And while I don't think anyone on the Journolist directly took Ackerman's suggestion that they call people who raised the Wright issue "racist" — that happened all on its own — the way many on the left used the "racist" slur during the 2008 campaign was a mistake. As someone who confessed to being disturbed by Wright's worldview as it unfolded like a slow-motion train wreck in the spring of 2008, I was called "racist" so often the word lost its sting. I honestly believe that the wanton use of that terrible term to defend Obama is part of why today, when there is genuine racism against the president from the right and within the Tea Party, it's sometimes hard to get anyone to pay attention.

Ultimately, discussing racism brings us back to Andrew Breitbart's lies about Shirley Sherrod. It's a disgraceful story with no heroes — except Sherrod and the white farmers who came forward to support her, Roger and Eloise Spooner. Caught off-guard by the right-wing frenzy over its resolution asking Tea Partiers to condemn the racists in their midst, the NAACP overreacted, took Breitbart's word about Sherrod, and denounced her. (Ben Jealous has now, rightly, apologized.) Tom Vilsack fired her. The White House insists it didn't tell Vilsack to let Sherrod go — but it won't tell him to take her back, either.

So to wrap up: Idiotic and false charges of "racism" ultimately backfire to hurt a black woman and, perhaps, our black president, who really can't win here: If Obama is seen to be intervening to help a black woman get her job back, race baiters will have a field day (how fast will Rush Limbaugh say he responded to Sherrod's plight faster than the Gulf's). If he doesn't, he won't sleep well tonight. Watch this interview with the Spooners, below, and tell me who's the racist (hint: It's Andrew Breitbart).

Shirley Sherrod is right: A lot of people are spending a lot of energy to get folks like the Spooners and Sherrod to think they should be enemies, when the real issue is class. The left should remember that lesson, because the right is invested in making sure no one learns it.

Update: An earlier version of this piece attributed the idea of calling Wright foes "racist" to both Chris Hayes and Spencer Ackerman; none of Hayes's emails endorsed that idea, and I apologize. You can read his whole reply to this post here.