Turnabout Is Unfair Play

Jonah Goldberg gets it right — Shirley Sherrod should get her job back.  She was misrepresented in order to play “gotcha” with the NAACP, and that is wrong even in the service of highlighting hypocrisy and dishonesty about race.

The question that won’t go away, however, is whether the outrage now justifiably being expended on behalf of Sherrod would ever be exercised in defense of the many conservatives who are falsely accused of racism. (Recent exposures from Journolist indicate that some prominent liberals embrace false charges of racism as an intentional political tactic.  So far, I have seen very few if any condemnations from their fellow liberals.)

It is therefore doubtful that conservatives will ever receive the benefit of the sudden awareness that racism is an inflammatory and unfair charge to use as a political weapon.