Looks like the Left has spent the day trying to turn Shirley Sherrod into a victim instead of the perpetrator of racial discrimination that she really is.

Shirley Sherrod, the department's ex-Georgia director of Rural Development, said the White House forced her out after the video surfaced showing her telling a story about how she withheld help to a white farmer in trouble. But she claimed the video omitted key context and that the administration just got scared.

"They were not interested in hearing the truth. No one wanted to hear the truth," she said in a television interview Tuesday morning.

I don't think she deserves an ounce of sympathy. We on the Right are simply applying to her the same standard that would have been applied by the Left and the lap-dog media to a white male GOP appointee who had confessed that he found a black citizen to be "uppity", that he therefore failed to give the black citizen all the help to which he was entitled, and that he then sent that black citizen to get help from "his own kind."

Especially imagine what would have happened if that hypothetical white male Republican were to have been addressing a Tea Party event and gotten the sort of support and affirmation from the audience for engaging in such discrimination as Sherrod did from her NAACP audience. It would have been set out as proof of racism within the Tea Party, just as this video clearly shows racism on the part of the attendees at the NAACP event.

No explanation would have been sufficient to justify the admission of racial discrimination. No partisan motive on the part of those who released the video would have been considered unacceptable. And there certainly would be no kid-glove interviews and media hand-wringing over how the speaker -- who admitted illegal racial discrimination -- was harmed by the disclosure. Indeed, the same liberal groups and media that are now expressing outrage at the release of the video have had no problem with using a broad brush to apply the racist label to the Tea Party movement and others who have dared dissent against the Obama agenda -- indeed, we've only today learned precisely how willing they are to do so falsely in the service of their liberal ideology.

Is it too bad that Shirley Sherrod gets hurt in this one? Maybe -- but she gets to be this years "Macaca Award" winner instead of the beneficiary of a Robert Byrd-style absolution. However, if the Left is going to insist upon casually playing the race card every time they feel slighted or threatened, then the time has come for those of us on the Right -- of all racial and ethnic backgrounds -- to begin to play it with a brutality and ferocity that will make the Left think twice before pulling it out this most incendiary of labels in any but the most egregious and indisputable cases of racial injustice. The Left chose this war; let them now face the consequences -- or concede their guilt in creating the worst racial climate of the last 40 years and forswear the abuse of the "racist" label right now.