Farmer's Wife Defends 'Racist' Worker

Who should be more ashamed of himself here: Andrew Breitbart, for falsely accusing a woman of racism, or Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, for handing him her scalp? On Tuesday, Breitbart posted a video of what he called a "racist tale" on his Big Government website in which USDA employee Shirley Sherrod, an African American woman, said she didn’t give a white farmer “the full force of what I could do” 24 years ago because of his race. However, Breitbart’s video was only a snippet of her speech—the full speech shows that she told this story as part of a larger narrative about how she came to help this family and learn that “race is not the issue, it's about the people who have and the people who don't.” In fact, the wife of the white farmer at the center of her tale says Sherrod is a “friend for life” and that Sherrod’s help “kept us out of bankruptcy.” Breitbart, who likes to scold journalists on his website Big Journalism, is now saying that he never saw the full video and that he simply posted the edited clips as they were sent to him, without investigating the story. Vilsack fired Sherrod on Tuesday, but said early on Wednesday that he's willing to reconsider his decision.