Saturday September 18, 2010

CONSERVATIVES WILL TELL YOU WHO THE REAL BIGOTS ARE, PART 56,298. Ann Althouse compares the dissemination of wacky "Political Incorrect" clips starring Christine O'Donnell to the smearing of a civil rights worker:

It's a good attention-getting ploy by Maher. He's got the video and he's taking clips out of context for the maximum shock/comic effect. It's perfectly okay to do that with video, right? Remember when Andrew Breitbart did something like that to Shirley Sherrod, and all the liberals got all righteous about taking things out of context?

Shirley Sherrod was shown, when context was added, to be making the polar opposite of the point Big Breitbart falsely accused her of making. What context is going to redeem O'Donnell's witchcraft stories? A clip of her saying, "Oh, I'm sorry, these are not actually my thoughts and experiences -- I was reading the cue-cards of a character who's supposed to be a total idiot"?

Better still is this Althouse commenter:

One quibble--no, Breitbart did not do any such thing to Shirley Sherrod. That was liberal spin that successfully changed the subject from the very damaging thing that Breitbart did do, which was expose the hypocrisy and racism of the NAACP.

Reminds me of the general under investigation in Costa-Gavras' Z who, when a reporter asks him if he's being railroaded like Dreyfus, righteously hollers, "Dreyfus was guilty!"

UPDATE. Michelle Malkin helpfully explains:

At 1:03 in the video, one of the panelists on the show criticizes O’Donnell for criticizing Halloween — “Wait a minute, I love this, you’re a witch, you go ‘Halloween is bad,’ I’m not the witch, I mean wait a minute.” She responds by explaining that she opposes witchcraft because she has had first-hand experience with what they do.

So O'Donnell was only saying that silly-sounding stuff to defend her real point -- that Halloween leads to witchcraft. Or vice-versa. Glad we cleared that up!