Imagine the field day that the left would have had if, instead of angry looking Black Panthers standing outside of polling places, it was a couple of angry looking rednecks with Aryan nation tattoos. See what sort of 'non-story' they would have made of it then.

Walsh is a joke. Just look at the way she excused Sherrod's racism on CNN's Reliable Sources with Howard Kurtz to get an idea of the kind of crazy she is:
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2010/0...

Better yet, follow the story from Matt Lewis' point of view:
http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/07/25/joan-wals...

It makes me wish I'd visited during the ACORN controversy because the same accusations ('heavily edited', 'selectively edited', 'doctored', etc.) were leveled against Mr. Breitbart back then. As if all those ACORN people were snookered into giving advice to a pimp and his prostitute on how to set up a house of ill-repute filled with underage foreign prostitutes. I didn't believe the claims of the mainstream media then, and after this Sherrod incident I sure as hell don't believe them now.

First comes Hardball where, to his credit, Chris Matthews includes Sherrod's redemptive moment yet then goes on to accuse Mr. Breitbart of lying and gets Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post and Michelle Bernard of whatever it is she’s from to do the same. 'You know, that‘s not journalism. I mean, it‘s lying, is what it is,' says Robinson, 'And I think we ought to call it for what it is.' Matthews jumps on the timeline issue, noting that Sherrod is recounting an incident from 24 years ago and before she was a USDA official. That a correction had by that point already been posted to the original clip and text intro here on BG, is seemingly irrelevant. He makes a big case out of this error, implying that it was an intentional misrepresentation by saying: 'And the dishonesty, the deceit, the evil of this Web site [BG] is to put this out as if it‘s something she did while she‘s on watch as a government official under the Obama administration so they can tag Obama with this.'

video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmOYl0_sz6o
transcript here: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38343790/ns/msnbc_tv-...

Then on Countdown, Lawrence O'Donnell presents the video to first exclude the redemptive moment, interjects a quick run-through of the narrative in his own words, then adds the redemptive portion from Breitbart’s clip, in fact mentioning that it was from the 'same video that Breitbart posted'. Then comes a quote from Sherrod in which she explains the turning point moment we just saw from Breitbart’s clip. O'Donnell then presents a further excerpt of her redemption taken from 'the full speech' released that day by the NAACP, prefacing the clip with, 'Here is part of the video that Mr. Breitbart did not want you to see and did not post on his website.' Note that this extra bit adds nothing more substantially that the redemptive moment from the Breitbart clip didn’t already include. Rich versus poor not just black versus white, yadda yadda yadda.

video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXeHTLP8GLg
transcript here: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38341971/ns/msnbc_tv-...

Finally, Rachel Maddow presents the video cut up just as O’Donnell did in the previous hour. She stops the clip at Sherrod’s confession ‘So, I didn‘t give him the full force of what I could do.’ Like Chris Matthews two hours earlier, Maddow corrects the already-by-then-corrected timeline to point out that Sherrod was describing an incident from 1986 when she was not an employee of the USDA. She then presents the Spooner family’s testimony and their defense of Sherrod before airing the redemptive moment. Since Maddow is focused primarily on criticizing Fox News’ handling of the story, Andrew Breitbart’s name never comes up. Yet the mainstream media has been characterizing Breitbart, Fox News, and BigGovernment as more or less the same entity in this incident since the get-go, so the effect is still the same. One gets the impression that Mrs. Sherrod’s turning point moment had been deliberately spliced out, at least on the Fox News programs.

video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptbuIme-iCc
transcript here: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38343831/ns/msnbc_tv-...

To be honest, Maddow might have a point about the way Fox handled the story. I don’t watch any of their news programs and find it quite likely that they played up the racism aspect of Sherrod’s story and ran with that without paying any attention to the redemptive moment that was in Mr. Breitbart’s original clip. However, by this point the NAACP and USDA were guilty of exactly the same offense and both had offered their recriminations of Mrs. Sherrod’s seemingly racist attitudes. What would one expect Fox to do at that juncture?

There is no way at all that anyone would mention anything 'redemptive' I would be ran out of whatever position I held and taunted for eternity.

Now lets apply this same thing to any known conservative in recent history. There would be mobs protesting around the country.

So the lesson is: Oh no, something that makes the left look bad, a racist on the left – rationalize and scrub it as fast as possible, explain it away and attack whomever dared put it out.

Someone on the right disagrees? – smear them as a racist at all costs with little or no evidence and do so with complete impunity.