The Huffington Post regularly receives criticism on this site for offenses ranging from bias to outright absurdity, but every now and we’re surprised.

Take for instance blogger Lee Stranahan’s analysis of conservatives’ treatment and the fradulent claims in Pigford and how the media just hasn’t gotten around to actually talking about it – as seen most recently in the Rep.King vs. John Boyd battle on AC360 last week.


If you’re a progressive and you think the right tosses out the term ‘socialist’ like an odd form of Ayn Rand Tourette’s Syndrome, just take a look at the comments section of your favorite left wing blog (including HuffPost, to be fair) and see how often the word ‘racist’ gets used as pretty much the sole argument against someone.

[…]

King is making a factual claim. Why not follow that line of inquiry? Why go down the racist rabbit hole? Show me the box and the dude. If you can’t show them to me, explain why you can’t. The box is either real or not and it either proves that there were more than three (3!) fraudulent claims or it doesn’t.

And even a few fraudulent claims add up. Let’s do some simple math.


Each Pigford claim paid a minimum of $50,000. If there were only 20 fraudulent claims, that’s a million bucks — enough to do a little tiny bit of reporting on. If there are two thousand fraudulent claims, that’s a hundred million dollars of misuse of tax money and cash that won’t get to the black farmers who actually were discriminated against.

Stranahan says:

In the case of the King v. Boyd fight over Pigford, Anderson Cooper is letting the USDA get away with telling a massive and easily disprovable whopper.

Stranahan gets what 99% of mainstream media does not, and summarizes just how damaging – beyond the fleecing of America – the Pigford case truly is:

The second is that the settlement was a lousy one for black farmers who faced real discrimination by the USDA and ended up losing their land, settlement or not. This issue of land loss is major, and the black farmers who originally filed never were able to get their stories out about their treatment by the USDA.

Farmers who were actually discriminated against get shafted by fraud. The offense against them is lost in the shuffle. It’s adding insult to injury.

I would have loved to see Stranahan bring up Shirley Sherrod’s involvement in this and how she got the biggest piece of the pie, bigger than those who perhaps bore the worst offense, but his piece already demonstrates more questioning and objective analysis than demonstrated by any of the the inquiring “fine minds” of the MSM.

Well done. Credit where it’s due.