What is most fascinating about that second day, however, was the conservative reaction to the collapse. At midday on the 20th, Rush Limbaugh was still praising Breitbart: "I know that Andrew Breitbart's done great work getting this video of Ms. Sherrod at the U.S. Department of Agriculture and her supposed racism and so forth saying she's not gonna help a white farmer."
By the evening of the 20th, however, conservatives were backing away, acknowledging that an innocent women had been defamed.
Here's Glenn Beck.
Here's Rich Lowry, editor of
National Review.
Here's Instapundit.
Here's the popular Anchoress blog at
First Things.
Even the racially incendiary Eric Erickson tweeted his disquiet, and then
posted this on his RedState website.
But you’ll never guess who emerged as the villains of the story in this second-day conservative react. Not Andrew Breitbart, the distributor of a falsified tape. No, the villains were President Obama and the NAACP for believing Breitbart's falsehood.
Breitbart went almost universally unmentioned. Erickson even justified Breitbart's falsehood as a tragic but necessary and justifiable measure of conservative self-defense:
This is what we have become in politics because of the unrepentant race-baiting on the Left. It has become a tit for tat war of retribution. ... That war has casualties on both sides. Ms. Sherrod is the latest. It is not fair. But that’s how the Left plays and the Right must fight on offense or not fight at all. It disgusts me to have to say it, but that is so very sadly where we are."
Breitbart himself
had this to say about those who would manipulate the public record for ideological purposes:
Journalists love whistle-blowers. Just not when the whistle is blown on them. Journalists love transparency. As long as they’re not the ones being exposed. No steadfast journalism rule is unbendable when it comes to justifying and protecting the racket that is modern journalism, specifically, political journalism in the United States today.
The ends justify the means .... They lie when they claim to be objective. They lie when they claim to be unbiased, because these so called "truth seekers" are guilty of engaging in open political warfare. And when the whistle is blown, they simply double down.
But that of course was not a confession or apology. Breitbart continues to defend his own "ends justify the means" bending of the truth, as you can see here in
this July 20 interview with CNN’s John King.
No, Breitbart’s indignant words on the 20th were aimed at another snippets-out-of-context scandal for the Right: the
Daily Caller’s publication of quotations from the JournoList archive in which liberal activists and bloggers jeered George Stephanopoulos for asking Barack Obama about Jeremiah Wright.
Speaking on a liberal list serve, journalists had wondered how the Wright story could be stifled. One obnoxious young participant had even suggested that the story could be killed by hurling accusations of racism at conservative figures like Fred Barnes and Karl Rove. Conservatives exploded: The media were colluding to quash bad news about their beloved Obama! Only of course the Wright story was not quashed — unlike the story of Breitbart's role in Sherrod's firing, which
has been, at least among conservatives.
On the phone on the evening of July 20, a friend asked me: "Can Breitbart possibly survive?" I could only laugh incredulously. I answered: "Of course he'll survive, and undamaged. The incident won't matter at all." 
