Dumbfuckery du Jour

Epic fucking USDA fail:

It looked like Breitbart and the Big Government website had gotten the goods on another one of their enemies. But as is often the case, there's more to this one than meets the eye.

The story involves USDA official Shirley Sherrod, the director of regional development in Georgia. She spoke recently at an NAACP event, and Big Government posted a portion of her remarks. As far as the far-right site is concerned, Sherrod "admitted" that she's used her "federally appointed position" to "discriminate against people due to their race."

At first blush, the allegations almost seem fair. The video shows Sherrod talking about a deliberate decision not to help a white farmer because she was "struggling with the fact that so many black people had lost their farm land."

And so Tom Vilsack demanded her resignation, and the NAACP condemned her, all without pausing a moment to consider one teensy possibly significant fact:

The anti-ACORN crusade -- and its creative editing -- should have been the first clue that right-wing video clips released by Breitbart and Big Government may not be what they seem to be. Shirley Sherrod offers another painful reminder.

Because, as it turns out, context is absolutely everything.  It's just that Breitbart and his merry band of fuckwits kinda sorta forgot to include those bits of the video that explained why Sherrod had gone to bat for the farmer after all, learning the important lesson that race doesn't matter in such matters, and has applied that lesson about going beyond race ever since.

I would just like to remind everyone that when Breitbart et al post something that's giving off a lot of smoke, one should fan said smoke away and determine if there's actually a fucking fire before busting out the fire extinguishers.

Bonus dumbfuckery: Ben Stein performs an exhaustive study of the personal qualities of the unemployed (i.e., picks what passes for his brain) and concludes they almost all suck.  Additionally, what "family values" really means to a Con.  I know, I know, a man boinking his stepson's estranged wife on the side would not seem to be a "family values" candidate, but he totally is - at least compared to David "Diapers" Vitter.