As I said last week, the Breitbart rules of war are simple: If you’re on defense, you are losing — and over the past few weeks, the GOP-tea party has found itself on defense time after time. The litany of abuses that has right wingers on defense includes the Mark Williams “Colored People” letter, which led to the expulsion from the National Tea Party Federation of his GOP-backed astroturf group Tea Party Express; the revelation that Breitbart published deceptively edited videos of Shirley Sherrod’s speech and the ACORN “undercover investigation”; Fox News’ race-baiting in its promotion of the New Black Panthers Party non-story and its coverage of ACORN and Shirley Sherrod, the latter of which elicited a rare admission by a Fox exec that mistakes were made.
Now, via Newshounds, comes another apology from Fox — this one from Greta Van Susteren, the network’s resident Scientologist host, who rushed to her blog to apologize because an obviously racist producer on her show couldn’t tell the difference between Shirley Sherrod and Maxine Waters, a 10-term congresswoman from Los Angeles:
We hate it when we screw up here at ON THE RECORD. Right now we are trying to console ourselves with the fact that, while we did a doozy of a mistake, at least it was unintentional, we noticed it immediately and scrambled to fix it immediately. And yes, even with telling ourselves that, we still feel horrible! (and we should feel horrible!)
What happened? I hate to tell you but we need to fess up to this one. Somehow when we were talking about Congresswoman Maxine Waters during the news show, tape went up on our screen of Shirley Sherrod and not Congresswoman Waters. Yes, a very bad mistake and a painful one for which we are very apologetic. We really don’t know what to say and there is nothing that you can post to make us feel better (not that we deserve to feel better!) This mistake was bad, very bad and we are immensely sorry.
Here’s video of the segment:
Obviously, to Fox News segment producers, all African Americans look alike — even women, one of whom has been all over the news lately and the other who has served in Congress for 20 years.
It would be mistake if they confused Maxine Waters with tom delay …