Shirley Sherrod critic humiliates himself on definition of 'lynching'

I thought I had seen it all when it comes to the Shirley Sherrod debacle.

At first the incident was an embarrassment for the Obama Administration and the NAACP, but apparently members of the right are getting jealous. Some are obviously trying to outdo both parties in terms of  humiliating themselves:

From Talking Points Memo comes this:

On Monday, former Reagan administration official Jeffrey Lord astonished the left and the right by penning an article in the conservative American Spectator attacking former-USDA official Shirley Sherrod for using the term "lynching" to describe the murder of one of her relative years ago. The problem, according to Lord, was that the victim, Bobby Hall was beaten to death by a blackjack, rather than being hanged by the neck. "It's...possible that she knew the truth and chose to embellish it, changing a brutal and fatal beating to a lynching."

Critics, even at his own magazine, pounced, noting that a lynching is an extrajudicial murder by a mob, whether or not the weapon of choice is a rope.

Lord was referring to the story Sherrod told about the murder of her relatives in the infamous speech which was truncated to make it seem as if she was a racist:

I should tell you a little about Baker County. In case you don't know where it is, it's located less than 20 miles southwest of Albany. Now, there were two sheriffs from Baker County that -- whose names you probably never heard but I know in the case of one, the thing he did many, many years ago still affect us today. And that sheriff was Claude Screws. Claude Screws lynched a black man. And this was at the beginning of the 40s. And the strange thing back then was an all-white federal jury convicted him not of murder but of depriving Bobby Hall -- and I should say that Bobby Hall was a relative -- depriving him of his civil rights.

 Because of the criticism his piece received from both the left and the right, Lord goes farther in his criticism of Sherrod:

 . . . Lord later expanded his critique of Sherrod by arguing that Hall wasn't beaten to death by enough people to constituted a mob, and therefore it couldn't have been a lynching in two different ways. He stands by that assessment.

"Certainly the image in my head of a lynching is rope around the neck," Lord told me. "And when we really got into this, it was quite apparent to me that there was all sorts of other things. That there has to be a mob -- mob action. Well what is a mob? Is it two people? Is it three people?"

Unbelievable. I have always believed that electing a black man  as president would bring all sorts of strange people out of the woodwork.

And here is Jeffery Lord bending over backwards to prove my point. 

Give it another week and they will be saying that Sherrod isn't an African-American.


Related posts:

360 degree turn - Now the right is attacking Shirley Sherrod for calling Breitbart a racist

Andrew Breitbart - the NAACP's best friend and the Tea Party Movement's worst enemy