Sherrod Critic: She Used 'Lynching' To Gin Up Democratic Voters

Claiming that the southern Jim Crow/democrat/segregationists are still in the Democratic party is like claiming that modern day Republicans are still the party of Lincoln, that big-spending liberal.

If conservatives "engage on race" the way Lord has, their campaign to win over black voters will go gangbusters!

This idiot has made me understand why Republicans go so absolutely monkeys dung flinging crazy when anyone uses the word "empathy." They really think it is, at best, a character defect to be carefully trained out of their children and, at worst, a threat to all that is good and decent in the world.

This guy has the staggeringly clueless gall to say that his over-privileged lily-white country club ass is a far more reliable judge of the meaning of the word "lynch" than an older black woman whose uncle was extra-judicially tortured and beaten to death. And now he's truly shocked and offended that anyone would even dare take issue with him. Indeed, the mere fact that this woman would use a different definition of the word than he does is proof of her racism and, by extension, the racism of all blacks and, indeed, the entire Democratic Party. (But then, what do you expect from those people?)

it's a numbers game. less than 13% of the population refusing to vote for you isn't that big a deal if even you get the racist/race-anxious vote. Even if the racist/race-anxious vote was roughly only 15m (saying that only 10% of the white identified population was really eating this stuff up) the and the black vote was 38m, 31m of African Americans identify as Democrats historically and because Republicans believe that racial politics matter to black democrats, (they don't to black people who vote consistently; Republicans have a history of opening the 'big tent' to people who we would not like to sit next to at a circus) it's an issue of 4 million people you have a chance to get the vote from versus 15m who are listening intently to race issues/ are sensitive to them and care about them and are white and feel threatened by this silly media-vulture posturing. It's actually really effective. Create an enemy, focus on victimization of the people you represent to make them feel powerless and threatened, zoom in on people of a lower status, seed suspicion that people who are lower-status are receiving advantages that they 'don't deserve' and don't promise anything by claiming that when you are given the power you will do nothing as a service to the people you represent. What get me confused is the republicans often claim that once they get into office they are going to do NOTHING for the people that voted for them... If you want nothing out of government, why are you voting?

I wrote to Lord an email and said the following: I'm curious to know if you think James Byrd was or was not lynched in 1998 in Texas when he was dragged to death (chain around his ankles) by a pick-up truck for miles.

This was his email response, word for word, to me the next day:
"Casey....

I keep getting asked to read the dictionary. Well, I have.

Random House Webster’s College Dictionary defines lynching as: “to put to death, esp. hanging by mob action and without legal authority.”

In the Screws case there were three - three - law officials charged. Three is not defined as a mob, which is a "large crowd." No mob, no mob action. The Court ruled the three - law officials all - acted under "color of law", Which is to say with, not without, legal authority.

So. No mob. No mob action. Legal authority. Therefore, no lynching.

The honest truth. And saying otherwise will not change the Court ruling or Webster's.

As to Byrd, I looked the case up the other day. There were...wouldn't you know...three people who did it, all now in prison. I'm not a lawyer. Remember the first case was in 1945. I honestly don't know what's changed legally in this area in today's world. But if the 1945 opinion were still in force, those three would not, I think, be a mob. HOWEVER - the very big difference: Byrd's killers were just three private citizens. They had zero protection as, to use the 1945 language, being "under cover of law." Two of Byrd's killers were convicted of murder, the third got life for helping. The first two are still on death row.

Thanks. This stuff is crazy. I think the 1945 Court was wrong. But hey..I wasn't here in 1945!

Jeff Lord"

He's nothing if not consistent. So I responded with:
Jeff,

Thank you for responding. I couldn't disagree with you more, but I do thank you for taking the time to write.

I have to wonder whether people thought Charles Lynch, for whom the term "lynching" is named, was acting under the color of law when he ordered the first "lynching" of British loyalists. Charles Lynch was, interestingly, a justice of the peace at the time he ordered the loyalists put to death. Whether someone is acting under the color of law is really a red herring. When cattle barons lynched cattle thieves in the lawless west, they weren't doing it because they didn't like the color of the thieves' skin. Rather, they wanted to "take the law into their own hands." Was their act justified? I don't know. But arguably they did it "under the color of law" and their actions were likely much more justified than that of three racists police officers on the steps of court house beating a negro to death.

Of course, at the end of the day, I'm much less concerned with a technical definition of lynching and any dispute over what the word really means, as I am with the fact that you chose to attempt to destroy a woman's credibility because of the choice of a word on which whose meaning two people could have different views. Ms. Sherrod's account would have been no less outrageous and no less sad had she chosen the word "murder" but you may have even taken issue with that. You see, your problem is less with what Ms. Sherrod said as with the fact that she was even saying it at all. It appears you'd prefer her to thank her lucky stars she lives in better times and to keep her mouth shut. I mean, after all, there's a black president now! What does she possibly have to complain about?

Your choice to focus incoherently on the use and definition of the word "lynch" demonstrates the intellectual dishonesty that permeates your column. In the future, you ought write what you really think. At least someone like Andrew Breitbart, when he said his ultimate goal was to destroy the institutional left, was being intellectually honest. And we know from where he stands and operates. You, on the other hand, hiding behind the "well, I was a political director for Ronald Reagan, dangit, so I *must* be smart" line, are just betraying your own internal belief system. Just come out with what you feel. Say it! Write it! Let the world know! Because the truth is, we already do.

Regards,

If stupid were an art form, this guy would be Picasso -- a prolific producer of the best stupid has to offer.

Once your at the level of being beaten to death with a blackjack, I think it's pretty hard to "gin that up" anymore. But this fits in with that old pattern of behavior on the right. trying to portray white people as the real victims of institutional racism in the United States.

Jeffrey Lord is disgusting beyond belief. I'd like to see high profile Democrats call for his ouster at the American Spectator. And while we're at it, I think they should call on the Washington Times to fire Andrew Breitbart, who fabricated the whole Shirley Sherrod false racism smear in the first place.

This guy nailed every dog-whistle racist talking point there is.

Poor white people. Blacks have all the advantages. That must by why they control all the wealth in this country. That must by why you can hardly find a white face in corporate board rooms anymore. That must be why black unemployment is so much lower than for whites.

Am I the only one who remembers the last time "lynching" was used as a word to effectively gin up support? That would be the Thomas confirmation hearings when he noted, in a very scripted manner, that it had turned into a "hi tech lynching".

Lynching in the older vernacular is not just being hanged. Its everything that is involved in the killing of a person.

This is the standard conservative stupidity at work.

I agree with this man on one and only one thing: I really hope that so-called Conservatives who think like he does and express themselves with this level of intellectual and moral clarity continue their outreach efforts toward so-called Minorities...

Lord's claim that Democrats made it impossible for Hall's killers to be brought to justice is tendentious at best. It was the FDR Justice Department which brought federal charges against the officers who murdered hall, and a Supreme Court dominated by FDR appointees ruled 6-3 that such prosecutions -- under Reconstruction-era civil rights laws -- were constitutional. It's true that the convictions of Hall's murderers were reversed, but they were reversed because of defects in the original trial, and the Court allowed the men to be retried.

In doing so, they established a precedent for federal prosecution of white Southern violators of blacks' civil rights that would become crucial to the civil rights struggle in the decades to come.

For more, see this review of the case at my blog:

http://studentactivism.net/2010/07/27/screws-v-us/

"Get out there and engage on race"

Lecturing African Americans on the true meaning of the word "lynching" is a great start there, bucko.

After reading the entire article, I'm even more disgusted with Mr. Lord.

Personally, I think the GOP has a decent platform to attract at least some middle class black voters. Personal responsibility, family values, freedom, etc...

Same goes for some Latino voters.

They are just so damn tone deaf as to repulse all but a handful of generally odd, militaristic, and/or self-hating black and Latino voters.

When someone brings up the lynching of an ancestor, something that's occurred in living memory by the way, it's best not to argue it on a technicality. I don't even care if he's wrong or right. Either way he loses hearts and minds.

And it's not enough to say that the other side's worse. You have to show that your side is better.

Let these stodgy white guys keep talking. That's who's behind the scenes donating money to the GOP, running their campaigns-- elites, and the worst kind, the kind who have contempt for the poor, the kind with a complete lack of empathy for where people come from, and what that means for where they can go.

If I were black or poor, and I understood this, I'd pick the elitist volvo latte sippers over those guys any day. Black people get it. Poor whites often don't.

If we could actually talk about class (ie. the difference between being poor and rich) in this country, maybe they would. That's exactly what Sherrod was doing in that NAACP speech, lest we forget. No wonder they've tried everything to make it a racial thing.

The race-baiting, selfish rich white-only country club inbred mayflower pricks are the ones behind the scenes; the cynics behind the Willie Horton stuff, the you-betcha-family-values nonsense, and all of the other non-issues that routinely condescend to their inferiors.

Call 'em out.

Does anybody have any show polish or burnt cork? I'm tired of being oppressed. Come to think of it, I guess I'll need a dress, too. And than, straight to the top! Easy street, here I come!

Somehow, I don't think it's the black vote he is looking for. He's looking for votes, tho.

Though when he's attacked in the media, he'll likely describe that as a media lynching.

Some of the most horrific lynchings (and the lynching of Hall is listed in the historical record as such) involved roasting the victim alive or dragging the victim to death behind a truck (for example, that of James Byrd,Jr. in Jasper, TX in 1998). In fact, according to some accounts of the Hall lynching, and there were witnesses who heard and saw it, he was dragged around the courthouse square behind the sheriff's car after they had beaten him unconscious (and continued to beat him for fifteen minutes after that). By the time they threw his body in the jail, he had a cracked skull from which he later died in the hospital in Albany. No doubt the sheriff and two deputies who were drunk decided to call an ambulance for him about the same time that the sheriff was busy forging the arrest warrant.

These rightwingers are all closet white supremacists, and when they say the word racist, what they mean is "uppity." They are stuck in a time warp in The Reconstruction. "Marxism" and "Socialism" are their terms for their fear-fantasy of the social upheaval of blacks come-to-power, black privilege replacing white privilege, black entitlement replacing white entitlement, black wealth replacing white wealth.

Lord's larger point - about the Democratic Party's appalling history on racial matters - is one thousand percent correct, and frankly I don't see how a reasonable person can disagree with it. The Democrats were THE party of slavery, secession and segregation. The two most racist Presidents in US history were Andrew Jackson and Woodrow Wilson - both Democratic heroes to this day. And the biggest racial bomb-throwers today are all Democrats - Al Sharpton (whose career was built on promoting Tawana Brawley's slur and lie, and who has been convicted for slander), Jessie Jackson, Harry Reid and every other pipsqueak official, institution or commentator who accuses the Tea Party of racism (including, now, and most unforunately, the NAACP) when they know full well it's a lie but do it as a diversionary tactic because they're losing the debate on the merits (thank you Journolist, for the smoking gun evidence).

Let me clear - I am not saying 'white people are now guilty of racism,' I am saying that the Democrats have ALWAYS been the party to play the racial card, consistently, explicitly and deliberately, for political reasons. The worst you can say about the worst on the GOP side on this issue (Jessie Helms) is small potatoes in comparison. The history of racial injustice in the US is almost exclusively part and parcel of the history of the Democratic party.

So Bravo, Jeff Lord, for speaking truth to power (media power, esp.), standing your ground and carefully explaining the facts. But of course, the Left and Democrats more generally will bitterly cling to the myth of their superiority, because they're slow learners...but with love and patience, we can help them see the light.

I can't believe this fool earns the money he does.

So, this really stood out to me:

"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."

Er...Willie Horton?

Implicit bias meets terror management theory is pretty much what he's talking about here, and it's pretty much a modus operandi of the GOP.

Did anyone else notice that he used "flammable" when he meant "inflammatory" ("To be an official of the United States government and stand up there and make such a blatantly flammable description...")? He's not just a clueless racist asshole; he can't even speak the fucking language.

Setting the issues of race, politics, and semantics aside for a moment...

Hey, douchebag! One way or another, her father was brutally murdered. So, stfu already. Whatever else you may be, you are nothing if not tacky, seriously.

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."

Yeah, I was there, too, pal. I grew up in Gaffney, SC, where the home of a member of my church was bombed by the KKK in the 1950's after she wrote an essay saying that integration was inevitable

Yeah, I was there also, and not too far from where you were, I grew up in the upper part of Spartanburg county, near Inman, and I can say that this moron is not only an idiot he is also a liar. Now I don't know where he was, but it wasn't in the SC and South that we were growing up in. . He lies, The sudden growth of the GOP in SC into the dominant party was the direct result of forced integration.
Another point not really covered is the use of the term (under color of the law) which he states means that the lawmen were acting with legal authority. This is plainly a bald faced lie, the term actually means using the assertion of legal authority to perform an act or action that is clearly illegal.

Yeah, whatever. Anyone who believes this twisted wacko is beyond reason and beyond reality.

Lord of the flies.

This guy has an agenda. He is a racist fascist prick--no doubt in my mind whatsoever. An historical revisionist who would turn the good into the bad and the bad into the good.

Furthermore he is passive aggressive and extremely angry.

I WAS THERE.

Yeah he was. And he was cheering for George Wallace.

Funny he didn't seem to have a problem when Clarence Thompson called his confirmation hearing a "modern day lynching" and he never suffered harm to one hair on his head.

Bias anyone?

Lord is simply amazing in his ignorance that seems to rise out of his need to deny his racial bias.

The Democratic Party that he insists lynched Sherod's father is not the same Democratic Party that exists today.

In the South prior to 1964, the Democratic Party was the party of the Racists in the South. The move out of the party had begun in 1948 when the Dixiecrats - a racist Party - split away from the Democratic Party over Truman's integration of the military and the Civil Rights plank of the Party supported by Hubert Humphrey.

Then in 1964 when Lyndon Johnson pushed through the Civil Rights Act, the south began to move to the Republican Party. That was the whole basis for Nixon's Southern Stradegy.

Martin Luther King had been a Republican all of his life until the early 60's. He was a Democrat at the time of his death in 1968.

It is my suggestion that neither the of the National Parties are racist parties, but there are racist elements in both and the object is to win elections. As a result the Parties just llok the other way a lot of the time.

Let's go back to the accusation that Shirley Sherrod's characterization of a relative's murder as a lynching was a lie and she used the word "lynching" as a provocation. When I think of the word "lynching" I have the concept of vigilantes taking the law into their own hands and stringing someone up. Police officers beating an innocent man to death while in their custody, is more horrific (if one brutal murder can be compared with another) to my perception of a lynching. If anything, the "truth" is more provocative than using the term lynching (noting again that brutal murder is still brutal murder). Is Mr. Lord's point that saying a murder was the result of a lynching is racist when in actuality the murder was the result of beating a black man in handcuffs to death by three white police officers prior to any adjudication of the matter? Accusing Ms. Sherrod of being a racist and a liar tells us all we need to know about Mr. Lord!

Raise your hand if you remember republicans telling whites that if they elected a black president (we're talking Obama, here) there would be race riots and no protection from black crime.

Also, um, Rand Paul.

Let me get this straight... people hate other people because of the differing amount and type of melanin in the skin? That's just crazy...

Murdered over a dispute of few cows? Or lynched by a mob because you talked to a white girl,.....the fact is the man who murdered her Father never spent a day in jail right, never even got charges brought against him. That's an Injustice of the highest severity no matter what you wanna call it. And to have Jeffrey Lord try and take that and turn it against his own daughter is Arrogance of the highest order. And then he ponders why there aren't that many greedy black republicans. The irony of it all!

p.s. "(James) Byrnes endorsed Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956, Richard Nixon in 1960 and 1968 and Barry Goldwater in 1964. He gave his private blessing to South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond to bolt the Democratic Party in '64 and declare himself a Republican, but Byrnes himself remained a Democrat that year. He eventually switched formal allegiances to the Republican Party. In 1968, he secretly advised Nixon on how to win over old-time Southern Democrats to the Republican Party."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_F._Byrnes

If this imbecile is considered an "intellectual" among Republicans and conservatives, its no wonder that the GOP is stuffed to the gills with bottom feeders.

The first line of defense is to blame someone else for your shortcomings. I think they call that denial.

It needs to be said: Jeffrey Lord is a tool, and a bore. He spends way too much time trying to rationalize something that just ain't. Occam's Razor, Jeffrey, Occam's Razor.

typical republican dooshbag. it just astounds me that dems are tied to racism. Liberals are more for people as a whole, poor, sick, etc.. Repubs, not so much. They like the rich and killing the middle class.

Not all republicans are racist but all racists are republicans. think about that one.

I'd think like Lord too if I'd been waking, sleeping, eating, drinking and breathing the Southern Strategy for 40 years. The racism in the Republican party advocated and proclaimed by Kevin Phillips, Lee Atwater, Pat Buchannan to name three has raised it's millions of ugly heads since Barak Obama's election. There's no other way to put it.

(yeah, I know - 40 yrs is about the age of the SS. I'm not looking up J.L.'s).

Oh thank you Mr. Lord. I didn't know there was a limit on the number of people kicking the crap out of you before it could be considered a lynching. I guess my great grandparents in Alabama overreacted when they sent my grandfather to live in New Jersey because three white men beat his brother to death. That wasn't a lynching, that was just a killing.

Emperor: "I can feel your anger. It makes your stronger:!

Fuck Jeffrey Lord and the horse he rode in on.

"The real travesty in all of this is, three months from now, when we are in the home stretch of this year’s political races, guys like Jeffrey Lord and Andrew Breitbart will be frequent guests on every news network in the country. Why do the networks—all of them, not just FOX News—gladly lend the air of legitimacy their cameras confer on their guests to these two, and the others like them? Because Lord and Breitbart are guaranteed to do the same thing they are doing now—make no sense, and promote nonsense."

High Tech Lynching Of Shirley Sherrod Has Begun by Kris Broughton at www.BigThink.com

As regards Mr. Lord, whose feverish digging must have already produced a hole deep into the bowels of the earth, I offer this from King Lear: "Wisdom and goodness to the vile seem vile;/Filths savor but themselves." Now, keep digging, and you'll soon wind up where you belong.

This guy had to go all the way back to the Southern Democrats to find a racist Democrat. No, really, it is white people who don't like other white people, right, Lord? Or maybe just white people who don't like you? I just don't like your point of view and how you have to make up stuff to try to defend your own warped point of view. One, minute, Democrats are Socialists, than Communists and now we are racists. I'm sure some Democrats are but we aren't whining about how white people are being discriminated against by people of color. We are being used by other white people. Our real enemies have been those elitists who are profiting off the slave labor of others. Those who are killing off our Military Soldiers for their personal profits. Profits they wouldn't have without us.

Just as long as we understand who are real enemies are here. Those who are not sharing the wealth of all of the work being done, fairly and responsibly. We have seen how poor the values of many Republicans have turned out to be. We wouldn't complain so much if you didn't lie about it and try to punish others for the very same things you are doing after hours every week.

GOP- Grand Old Projectionism