The disgraceful smear and rush to judgment in the case of fired federal worker Shirley Sherrod (above) is the latest in a series of sleazy cut-and-paste video hit jobs orchestrated and magnified by conservative media activists whose dishonesty now stands exposed to full public view.

We should all absorb the lesson currently being learned by the NAACP and the White House about how to handle those who reduce complex questions of race, class and power to slogans and sound bites.

I'll get to that in a minute.

But first: U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack deserves credit for owning up to the mistake he made when he fired Sherrod - and yesterday offering her a new job. It was a rare display of sanity after days of uninformed hyperventilation.

If this whole mess has made you as sick as it's made me, I'd suggest you give a hefty donation to the group Sherrod used to work for, the Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund, which has been helping low-income rural families and farmers for 43 years (you can find the group online at www.federation.coop).

I was honored to meet Sherrod a few times in the 1990s when I was working with credit unions serving low-income communities and made the long drive to Epes, Ala., for the federation's annual meeting.

Shirley and her husband, Charles Sherrod, are civil rights legends. They formed part of a small band of activists who fought racial segregation in southwest Georgia at a time when it was a grim fortress of hatred that dealt the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. a stinging defeat in the early 1960s.

Check the index of any decent book about King, or the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and look up "Sherrod" or "Albany Movement." It is literally the stuff of legend.

Fast-forward to today, when Andrew Breitbart and other conservative activists all but admit they are willing to twist facts to pummel liberals and advance right-wing policies and politicians. When caught dealing falsehoods, they trot out the lame, immoral excuse that "the other side" does it.

Last year, a few minutes of Breitbart's doctored videos of fake prostitutes and pimps visiting ACORN offices whipped Washington into a media frenzy and led to the group's defunding by Congress without a hearing, caucus or investigation of any kind - an illegal act, a judge later ruled.

But the damage was done, which was the point. Breitbart boasted to me, inaccurately, that the stunt was somehow akin to actual journalism of the "60 Minutes" variety, and that conservatives were primed to hit back against a biased media establishment.

His next few stunts didn't work so well. James O'Keefe, who posed as a pimp in the ACORN videos, got arrested in the office of Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu in New Orleans and was later convicted of entering a federal building under false pretenses.

Months later, when a group of congressmen complained about being called the N-word by Tea Party protesters, Breitbart simply called Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) - another civil rights legend - a liar, claiming that the absence of a videotape of the incident proves it never happened. He challenged Lewis to take a lie detector test.

Lewis, it's worth noting, has earned a sterling reputation over the course of many decades in public life. There is no reason to disbelieve him or the other eyewitnesses who say the epithets were hurled.

Breitbart, by contrast, has been caught in a grotesque distortion of the truth that no amount of misdirection can erase.

Anybody who's seen the full speech by Sherrod about her experiences working in rural Georgia - the same area where armed KKK terrorists murdered her father and threatened her mother - can't help but be impressed by her honesty, faith, wisdom and integrity.

She hails from a liberal tradition that right-wing shouters cannot easily demonize. It has little to do with Saul Alinsky - the much-demonized activist - and everything to do with King.

Breitbart, who snipped less than three minutes from the speech and supplied it to news organizations with false information about the subject of the talk, probably had no idea whom he was smearing. It served his purpose of the moment by persuading naive TV producers to turn the false portrayal into a story.

The NAACP and its new CEO, Benjamin Jealous, jumped at Breitbart's sucker bait, as did Vilsack. All of them were playing for the smallest of political stakes: winning a single news cycle.

There is much more important business in America these days. We face grave economic problems, frightening foreign threats and the old, unfinished business of building one nation under God, indivisible.

There's no time to waste on malicious, lying pranksters and their edited videos.

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Written by :

Andrea Miller