He’s not talking about a beer summit but rather the opposite — a meaningful chat, not a damage-control photo op. And not to prostrate himself either: He wants to know, quite rightly, why her anger over what happened somehow led to accusing him of wanting to bring back slavery. Even big-name reporters are flummoxed about that one, to the point where Anderson Cooper actually apologized last night on CNN for not challenging Sherrod when she said it.

She said she simply wanted an apology. Why not just do it?
All I can say is that this is a person on national television who said I wanted to put blacks back into slavery. This thing has gotten to a place that’s far beyond where it should be. I’d be more than happy to meet with her in private and have a discussion with her…

How do you think this got so out of control?
At the beginning, Shirley Sherrod’s first comments were that she got caught between the NAACP and the Tea Party and she said that the NAACP is the reason for this. That’s her quote. The intent of my post was to challenge the NAACP in its six-day media-enabled negative branding of the Tea Party as racist using provably false information that the N word was thrown at the Congressional Black Caucus [earlier this year during the health-care debate]. I’ve been doing this for over a year, and this is just one more attempt of mine to point out to the general public that there’s consistency here in the Democratic Party to strategically issue the race card. My regret was that has been lost, and Shirley Sherrod became the focus…

But do you agree that the edited video took things out of context?
Well, yes. But I put up what I had. It granted a great portion of her redemptive tale, but not all of it. If I could do it all over again, I should have waited for the full video to get to me.

The whole interview’s worth reading. As for Sherrod’s lawsuit, which seems shaky from the get go, HuffPo’s right that the favorable coverage she’s gotten since this clusterfark started actually hurts her in court for the simple reason that it makes it harder to show damages. Assuming her new job will pay more than the old one, and assuming that most people who watched the initial clip now know that it didn’t provide fuller context, how do you quantify the harm done? Beyond that, what about the fact that even the initial clip contained a short bit from the part of Sherrod’s speech where she said she realized it wasn’t about black and white? Chris Matthews noticed that last night in his segment on Sherrod — or rather, his second segment on Sherrod, recorded after the first one earlier in the afternoon didn’t quite go according to script. Skip ahead to 9:00 or so for the key bit.

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