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Jeffrey Lord, the author of a controversial piece about Shirley Sherrod in the American Spectator, has defended his piece and its arguments to Talking Points Memo:
On Monday, former Reagan administration official Jeffrey Lord astonished the left and the right by penning an article in the conservative American Spectator attacking former-USDA official Shirley Sherrod for using the term “lynching” to describe the murder of one of her relative years ago. The problem, according to Lord, was that the victim, Bobby Hall was beaten to death by a blackjack, rather than being hanged by the neck. “It’s…possible that she knew the truth and chose to embellish it, changing a brutal and fatal beating to a lynching.”
Critics, even at his own magazine, pounced, noting that a lynching is an extrajudicial murder by a mob, whether or not the weapon of choice is a rope.
Last night, in an interview with TPMDC, Lord defended himself and extended his critique of Sherrod, and the entire Democratic party, which he claims is the true repository of racism in the United States.
“I have felt for a long time that my friends on the American left, in the Democratic party have just had this atrocious history with racial issue,” Lord said. “I mean it just can’t possibly be any worse. I’ve gone back and read all the platforms for the Democratic party starting in 1840 which was the first one.”
What’s changed in the last generation, according to Lord, is simply the nature of the Democratic party’s racism.
“What struck me about [the Sherrod speech] was that sort of little, casual aside, where she says something about health care, and ‘I’ve never seen people so mean’ … The implication is — and she uses the phrase at one point ‘the black president’ and ‘we endured the Bush years’. And the implication to me was that she was saying ‘if you didn’t agree with Obamacare then you’re a bigot,’” Lord said. “The essence of the formula is ’scare race X to death that race Y or Z is coming after them in some fashion, and then, you know, you get all the votes and the money, etc, etc, etc. And that all that’s gone on over a couple years of history of the Democratic party is that the races have changed.”
“What is the difference, really, between Jimmy Byrnes trying to pursue a “white” agenda, and Sonia Sotomayor’s wise Latina comment?” Lord asked rhetorically.
For Lord, the key inconsistency is that Democratic southerners were to blame both for Hall’s murder, and for ultimately overturning the conviction of his killers, and yet, decades later, Sherrod sympathizes with the Democratic party.
“I understand that people on the other side are going to go poopoopoo and the Nixon Southern Strategy and all that kind of thing,” Lord said. “To think that this was just, all these people just switched their party and made the Republican party segregationist is just nuts. I was there.”
Lord stands by his initial criticism too: that Sherrod was wrong to use the term “lynching.”
“Lynching is most serious business,” Lord said. “Let’s just say for the sake of the argument that you’re ‘pro-life’ and you’re an official in the Bush administration at HHS in a comparable job to what Shirley Sherrod has. And you stand up in a neutral forum where you’re there as a government official and you refer to Roe v. Wade as the ‘Baby Killer Act. Holy cow, you don’t think there’d be any reverberation for that?”
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Slide // Jul 28, 2010 at 2:31 pm
Absurd. What a vile little man.
heap // Jul 28, 2010 at 7:07 pm
the ‘appeal to emotion’ charge he levies just makes no sense to me – the contention that using the word ‘lynched’ was in order to paint an image of something horrible.
at no point does the fact that it *was* horrible enter his thought process. had she eschewed the word that got his hind end in the air, and instead stated ‘was beaten to death by 3 police officers while his hands were secured behind his back’, would that somehow not be *more* of an attempt to describe a horrible thing….as a horrible thing?
this is like the wookie defense, but without the benefit of involving chewbacca.
Jeff Lord Defends His Shirley Sherrod Piece | FrumForum | The Daily Conservative // Jul 28, 2010 at 8:19 pm
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mickster99 // Jul 28, 2010 at 11:05 pm
Holy cow. Can Michael Steele talk this guy into running for office. He’s quick witted, clearly a master of a finely honed art of analytical thinking, unafraid to take an unpopular position and supported with logic and finesse, he’s got street smarts and he’s not afraid to call a spade a spade.
ericna // Jul 29, 2010 at 8:53 am
mickster99: That, Sir, was a fine piece of sarcasm.
westony // Jul 29, 2010 at 10:01 am
@mickster
I hope Steele does get this guy to run so he can end up another Sharon Angle trying to deflect the racism of the right by using “misleading” and juvenile comparisons. Sounds to me that instead of recruiting this guy to run for office he would make a “Great” Faux Entertainer espousing nonsense to feed the irrational fears of a dwindling “white” population in America.
busboy33 // Jul 29, 2010 at 5:44 pm
@heap:
re: the chewbacca defense
Thanks. Spraying coffee all over the keyboard isn’t going to be a pain to clean or anything.
John Q // Jul 30, 2010 at 3:54 am
Actually, Mr. Lord is quite correct that, prior to the 1960s and 1970s, a large part of the Democratic Party was made up of southern racists.
In the 1970s, after Democrats had passed civil rights legislation, the Republicans embarked on the all-too-successful “Southern strategy” to woo these white racists over to the Republican Party.
Which means that today a large part of the Republican Party is made up of…… well, you can fill in the blank.
blesscurse // Aug 3, 2010 at 10:59 am
Lord believes that Ms. Sherrod wanted to add the patina of “glamour” (his word) to the killing of her relative by falsely calling it a lynching? Fine. My mother was killed by a drunk driver in 1988. Sometimes members of my family refer to it as murder. I guess they are lying AND trying to add some “glamour.”
Is lynching officially listed in the Criminal Code as a specially defined crime? I don’t know the answer to that, but I assume Lord does. Is the punishment for lynching (as defined in Criminal Law) distinct and different from other forms of murder in which a person’s civil rights have been violated? There must be a host of decisions in which lynching is explicitly defined, explained and distinguished by various Courts, since the legal lynching language is what Lord is completely fixated on as being somehow absent in the court decision in question.
As for a handful of prominent Democrats being Klan Members early in their life: Yes, like Newt Gingrich’s serial adultery and Henry Hyde’s “youthful indiscretion” at age 41 and Daryl Issa’s vaguely criminal past, the Republicans were once the Party of Lincoln and then of Good Government. Before Lee Atwater and the Southern Strategy, and Thurmond and Helms and Abramoff and Vitter, etc. No party has a monopoly on ethical or moral corruption, and that is one reason why many white southern Democratic segregationists switched to the Party of Lincoln when it became politically expedient. But former segregationist LBJ got the Civil Rights act passed, and Democrats have for over 40 years been the party of Civil Rights. I’m not sure why Lord requires Sherrod to rehash all that in her deeply personal narrative of redemption.