Jeffrey Lord

If you haven't read his astounding piece in The American Spectator yet, this is your chance. First Lord cites a horrific story Sherrod told about a relative, Bobby Hall, who was murdered while in Sheriff Claude Screws' custody. Lord quotes from the shameful Supreme Court decision that overturned Screws' conviction for depriving Hall of his civil rights:

Hall, a young negro about thirty years of age, was handcuffed and taken by car to the courthouse. As Hall alighted from the car at the courthouse square, the three petitioners began beating him with their fists and with a solid-bar blackjack about eight inches long and weighing two pounds. They claimed Hall had reached for a gun and had used insulting language as he alighted from the car. But after Hall, still handcuffed, had been knocked to the ground, they continued to beat him from fifteen to thirty minutes until he was unconscious. Hall was then dragged feet first through the courthouse yard into the jail and thrown upon the floor, dying. An ambulance was called, and Hall was removed to a hospital, where he died within the hour and without regaining consciousness. There was evidence that Screws held a grudge against Hall, and had threatened to "get" him.

Sherrod hard characterized Hall's death as a lynching, Lord points out. But since only three men were involved, and since they were lawmen, not a vigilante mob, and they didn't use a rope, "lynching" doesn't fit Lord's dictionary's definition of the word and is clearly a misnomer. Case closed: Sherrod is a liar; Breitbart stands vindicated.Lord makes an equally spurious larger point--that there were a lot of racists among the Southern Democrats of the 1930s, 40s, '50s, and 60s. He seems to feel that this reflects horribly on Obama and Sherrod today. Since they are also Democrats, he says, they must be racists or hypocrites too.Lord seems to be suffering from an Asperger-like disorder; he has no idea why anyone would be offended by his line of reasoning. He has been vigorously defending his arguments--on the American Spectator site (where its readers, to their credit, have been trashing him mercilessly) and in the world at large. He even ventured into enemy territory and gave an interview to Talking Points Memo. The closing words of the TPM piece are almost as stunning as Lord's original article:

Lord says he doesn't want Sherrod to lose her job, and urges his fellow conservatives to work toward winning over black voters. "Get out there and engage on race," Lord said. "There's no reason in the world that we can't be getting the black vote. But it's our job to separate black from left and talk about left and right."

He makes Michael Steele look like Martin Luther King.