As has become the custom with unconscionable, anti-liberal acts perpetrated by the Obama administration, one of Obama’s steadfast defenders in the lefty blogosphere steps up with a half-baked, pathetic attempt to whitewash the offense. This time it’s the unfathomably stupid decision to fire Shirley Sherrod, and the man at bat is Josh Marshall:

Forty-eight hours ago the story was another bad apple found on Obama’s cart. By yesterday morning it was another black eye for Obama and Tom Vilsack for rushing to dump a blameless woman on no good evidence and cravenly or cowardly or pusillanimously running for cover because Breitbart, Roger Ailes and whatever other gods of The Crazy said boo! For progressives mad at their president, at some level, that’s understandable. They have no relationship with and expect only the worst from the Breitbarts and Fox Newses of the world. But with Obama they expect more. And it’s personal.

Still, you just have to back up from that and realize that as disappointing as Tom Vilsack’s first crack at this was, the idea that he or Obama is the bad guy in this story is not only preposterous but verging on obscene. It’s like the NYPD as the bad guy in the Son of Sam saga because they didn’t catch David Berkowitz fast enough. Or perhaps that the real moral of the story is that the woman with the stalker should have been more focused on personal data security. Not for some time has something so captured the essential corruption of a big chunk of what passes as ‘right wing media’ (not all, by any means, but a sizable chunk along the Breitbart/Fox/Hannity continuum) and the corruption of the mainstream media itself as this episode.

Josh should be glad he’s not taking his SATs because that analogy is one of the worst I’ve ever seen.

First of all, the Obama administration isn’t the NYPD in this analogy; they didn’t try to STOP the egregious offense in question, rather they legitimized it and then savagely added injury to Breitbart’s idiotic insults. Marshall doesn’t just try to hold Vilsack and his superiors blameless for firing a woman based upon lies spread by a professional media con artist; he paints them as avenging angels trying to stop it.

Utter madness.

A far better construction would paint the administration, or at least Vilsack, as Berkowitz, and Breitbart as the demonic dog that ‘made’ him do it. No matter how much Breitbart preens for attention, like a misbehaving child, he can’t *make* anyone overreact.

So a self-promoting, right-wing race-baiter of the first degree unleashes another ‘story’ on our pathetic national media. Vilsack, whether pressured from above or not, forces an employee of the US government out of her job based on heavily edited, misleading video pushed by said race-baiter. He doesn’t investigate, he doesn’t find out the facts, he doesn’t obtain the unedited video, even after the ACORN ‘scandal’ evaporated into thin air.

No; Vilsack heard a voice telling him to do something, and he did it.

Then you have the White House. What’s their role in this? Hard to say, as of yet. One thing’s for sure: Deputy Chief of Staff Jim Messina was bragging about what a great job they did canning an innocent woman to avoid media attention:

One source, who is unhappy with the administration’s handling of the incident, paraphrased Messina’s remarks: “We could have waited all day – we could have had a media circus – but we took decisive action and it’s a good example of how to respond in this atmosphere.”

Vilsack claims the firing was his call alone and that he fell down on the job; the White House seems to agree and seeks to avoid blame themselves. Both have offered their worthless apologies. Will there be any accountability?

Nope.

Gibbs maintained that the White House didn’t order Sherrod’s firing. He said President Obama was first told about the situation yesterday, and was briefed again today.

He also said that Vilsack’s job is safe.

Recap: ACORN fraudster Breitbart peddles another phony video. Vilsack fires an innocent woman; the Obama White House crows about what a great thing the administration did. After the full video is inevitably released and clears Sherrod, both Vilsack and the White House backpeddle furiously. Other than Ms. Sherrod, nobody’s lost their job. Despite being shown to be completely and utterly useless, Vilsack gets to stay.

Somehow, for Marshall and others in the O-Bot camp, that only reflects badly on Breitbart. What an accountability free world they live in.