Someone wrote this, and evidently meant it

It's hard to believe that there's still anyone out there who's trying to come up with a way to discredit Shirley Sherrod. It must suck to have so much invested in the notion that a black federal official could admit discriminating against a white farmer, only to have the facts emerge that a) she wasn't a federal official at the time, b) she didn't actually treat him differently than anyone else, c) that the farmer in question has fiercely defended her and that, d) aw, shit, her father was murdered by the KKK.

The only way Sherrod could be more sympathetic right now is if someone discovered her hobby rescuing baby seals or something. But that doesn't stop Jeffrey Lord at The American Spectator from trying, and failing dismally, to find dirt on her. Some people just don't know when to quit.

Lord bases this entire piece on his mistaken understanding of the word "lynching." In her now famous speech at an NAACP gathering, Sherrod mentioned that, in addition to her father's murder, a relative was beaten to death by a county sheriff and two other men, in a civil rights case that went all the way to the Supreme Court. Lord expends gallons of Internet ink saying that Sherrod exagerrated by calling the murder a lynching, with the implication that she can't be trusted on anything else. He even calls it a "debacle."

More problems with vocabulary. It's not a "debacle" if you're the only one who's upset, especially if you're, you know, completely bass-ackwards wrong.

A lynching is any extra-legal mob killing. Lord may be of the opinion that a lynching is only the classic rope-over-the-tree-branch like he's seen in the movies. The problem is that, for many Americans, lynching isn't something that only happens in the movies. It's very recent history that happened to people they knew or were related to, the threat of which hung over them as well.

I'm so sick and tired of this. In a recent post about Roman Polanski, I asked that people who've never experienced sexual assault stop intellectualizing about it and telling actual survivors how they should feel. Well, at our next White People Convention, I'm going to propose the following resolution: We will hereby stop telling black people how they should feel about racism and the history of racism in this country. We will stop thinking that we get to decide whether someone else's feelings are legit.

We will STFU and listen for a change. That would be nice.

And, by the way, just from a PR perspective... trying to downplay someone's family trauma by saying that her relative's vicious murder wasn't THAT bad is kind of a dick move. "What's the big deal? He was only handcuffed and kicked to death!" What a frakking asshole.