between. donna brazile, erick erickson, appreciate your time. thank you, and thank you, erick. thank you. coming up next on the program, the government official who demanded sherrod resign. where is she? we went searching to find her. ed henry with cnn. would cheryl cook be made available for any questions? there s been an allegation that she said that the white house wanted shirley to resign. will she be made available to answer questions? why not? i addressed that yesterday. nobody is saying what really happened. we ll try to find out the truth. that story, ahead. more on our breaking news. tropical storm bonnie, already forcing most of the ships and rigs to be moved from bp well area. chad myers joins us for an update and where the storm is heading.
thank you, and thank you, erick. thank you. the government official who demanded sherrod resign. where is she? we went searching to find her. would cheryl cook be made available for any questions? it s been said that she wanted shirley sherrod to resign. nobody is saying what really happened. we ll try to find out the truth. that story, ahead. more on our breaking news. tropical storm bonnie, already forcing most of the ships and rigs to be moved from bp well area. chad myers joins us for an update and where the storm is heading.
important debate should be celebrated but we have to have some ground rules and we need a media that helps enforce those. in the context of this you mentioned race has been front and center in our politics and in our discourse this week and often that can get divisive and get ugly. you mentioned at the top of the program a democratic senator from virginia adding his voice to this debate today, jim webb. with this op-ed in the wall street journal about affirmative action. he says 40 years ago as the united states experienced the civil rights movement the supposed dominance served as the whipping post for almost every debate about power and is it status in america. after a full generation of such debate wasp elites have fallen by the wayside and a plethora of government-enforced diversity policies have marginalized many white workers. erick, to you first. are you surprised to hear a democrat in the state of virginia which of course was the capital of the confederacy but barack obama
and i think the role of the media is to make sure that what happens is it doesn t get taken over by voices that put forward basically falsehoods. you said you challenged breitbart but what i would say is you have a tape where it shows no audience applauding yet breitbart is able to say repeatedly and not just on your network repeatedly that there is applause. and many points that didn t get challenged. that tape should have never been news in the first place and that i think is a fundamental issue. you re right. there is fear among people about change and race baiting is a perfect way to actually play into that, play off of that. we had the southern strategy with nixon and we re seeing it again. let me continue the conversation because you re meeting, james, with the progressive movement. erick you are out there with conservatives. obviously this shirley sherrod firing and i would say to you, james, we didn t fire shirley sherrod, we didn t take this story to the next level. but i wa
martin you don t think that s the bigger picture here. john, i don t give a damn what rush limbaugh thinks. he called george steinbrenner a cracker the day he died, so he s utterly irrelevant to me. erick has to be connected. the naacp was very clear. they did not call the entire tea party racist. there was never in the resolution or stated, so that s actually incorrect. what they re talking about is certain individuals. that s what he said. at the end of the day there s no doubt that shirley sherrod shouldn t have lost her job. i would think that secretary vilsack would actually come back and actually say, wait a minute. in light of the naacp posting the entire speech on their particular website that we will reconsider this. look, in looking at the entire comments, you see the breadth of the speech. did she admit in that particular