Sherrod resigned this week as state director of rural development in Georgia. She said she quit under pressure from the White House.
The extraordinary turn of events came less than 48 hours after a video depicting Sherrod talking about her experience with a white farmer went viral. While Sherrod emerged heroic for the treatment she received, the Obama administration appeared fearful, even panicky in dealing with a racially charged story.
Sherrod, who says her remarks had been selectively edited and taken out of context, told CNN that the White House "harassed" her to resign because the controversy was "going to be on Glenn Beck tonight."
When USDA officials contacted Sherrod saying the White House wanted her to resign, she says she tried to communicate that there was another side to the story.
Her videotaped remarks appeared to indicate she didn't give "the full force of what I could do" to a farmer because he was white. But she says the remarks were actually used to illustrate that people should not be judged based on race. The farmer has defended Sherrod, and credits her with saving his farm. But the administration officials wouldn't listen, she says.
"They were not interested in hearing the truth," Sherrod said of the administration. "No one wanted to hear the truth."
"The last time they asked me to pull over the side of the road and submit my resignation on my Blackberry, and that's what I did," Sherrod told The Associated Press.
Pundits on the left and right said Wednesday that the incident shows all the hallmarks of an administration panicked by free-falling approval numbers and negative coverage from conservative media.
Former GOP Congressman Joe Scarborough, on MSNBC's Morning Joe program, blasted the administration.
"Let me just say, if that scares a White House into firing a woman without due process, then that White House is not strong enough to run this country," he declared Wednesday morning. "And that is pathetic, and it's an indictment on the full-scale panic that has overtaken that place."
The narrative of panic was echoed on the program by commentator Patrick J. Buchanan.
"If this is true, and this did come from the White House," Buchanan said, "it acted out of fear and panic. It threw one of its own to the wolves. It not only didn't retrieve its wounded, it went down and shot its own wounded."
That's one place folks in politics could do a lot better, and we as voters could too. Grow a set and stand up for right. And we should vote for those that do, liberal or conservative. We get the govt we vote for, and voting for short sighted cowards nets you a short sighted cowardly govt. No matter the political orientation.
Obama has already proclaimed he acted stupidly
