One of my favorite aphorisms is "Cooler heads prevailed." It conjures up an image of a bunch of crazy people running around like headless chickens in the middle of a crisis, until some éminence, grise or otherwise, has the wit and the wisdom to say, "Wait a minute, let's settle down and think about this..."
Clearly that didn't happen at the Department of Agriculture when the decision was made to fire Shirley Sherrod, based on some comments she made about an incident back in the 80s, that initially appeared to be racist. The video clip that set things in motion has now been proven to have been edited and as frequently happens, it turns out there's more to the story. To put it another way, when Glenn Beck and the NAACP agree about something, which is that Ms. Sherrod should be reinstated, you know something's seriously out of whack.
Coverage of this story is all over the place, and so far the perspective I like the best comes from political scientist Jonathan Bernstein at his blog A plain blog about politics. I'm hopeful that when everything is said and done we will all be able to reflect on this strange episode and say that cooler heads prevailed.
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