Conservative Hacks Rule Their World

Step 1: A right wing asshole (who also happens to be a pathological liar) releases part of a video featuring USDA employee Shirley Sherrod with the sole purpose of making it look like she said scary stuff about white people.

Step 2: Tom Vilsak (Obama's Secretary of Agriculture) immediately fires her, reportedly with pressure from the White House because "Glenn Beck was going to talk about it".

Step 3: Various news outlets (and unlike the ACORN scam, most of the mainstream media as well) decided to do the slightest bit of research to realize the story is 100% BS. The tape was taken out of context, CNN actually checks out the family in question, who call Sherrod a "family friend".

Step 4: The White House says that the decision to fire Sherrod was "100%" on Vilsak, but that they stand by it.

Chris Bowers pointed this out, but it's fairly telling that it took a couple of minutes to make the decision to fire Sherrod based on a known liar's bullshit, yet as of now she doesn't have her job back. And even though they denied it earlier, new reports say that Rahm chief of staff Jim Messina celebrated how quickly they had fired her at their morning staff meeting.

I'm pretty happy that the fallout from this will probably force the administration to rehire her, and I'm sure everyone's sorry now, but they way this whole episode went down speaks volumes about the Administration.

If you're a conservative, no matter how much of a lying hack you are, the White House will always ask "how high?"

Now if you're a Nobel prize winning economist offering substantive criticism of how Obama is running the economy...