This is the only page I have that talks about Andrew Breitbart, and it’s especially timely today. In their obituaries, the news media, blogs, and blog commenters are falling over themselves lying about the dead, and the most common lie is that he somehow mistakenly defamed Shirley Sherrod. He did not. He included the context about Shirley Sherrod’s realization of her mistake in his original video of her road to Damascus. The stated point of the video was how the audience reacted to her mistake before she said it was a mistake.

Even the staff writers at Fox News felt compelled to include the left’s spin on the Sherrod story¹:

Breitbart became embroiled in a controversy of his own, though, for his reporting on a web video of Agriculture Department employee Shirley Sherrod. The edited video appeared to show Sherrod making a racist comment, but the full tape later put the remark in context and made clear that Sherrod was actually talking about bridging racial differences.

Certainly, the video edited by Breitbart showed Sherrod making a racist comment: that was her point in telling the story. The lie here is that “the full tape later put the remark in context”. The original video that Breitbart posted put the remark in context. This is a lie, it’s smoke and mirrors, to divert attention away from Breitbart’s bullseye: that the audience approved of her racism.

And you have commenters blaring it from liberal blogs and sneaking into conservative blogs trying to push the lie. I’ve seen it on Ace of Spades HQ and on Legal Insurrection.

Everybody makes mistakes; I’m sure Breitbart made some too. The Sherrod story wasn’t one of them.