Who among us has not said at one time or another that they wished we had better political leaders. I know that I have.  The thing is, who in their right mind would want to lead a public life? There is very little money in it (if you're honest and most are), you have to say and endorse things for your political party that you don't really believe, and given the nature of modern elections, you have to spend nearly your entire waking hours thinking about or raising money for the next campaign.  Finally, your past is going to be put on display out of context for all the world to see and every word you utter is going to come back to haunt you unless you constantly edit yourself to speak only in platitudes and saccharin bromides.

Take a look at three current examples of people being blasted for what they said even though they didn't say a damn thing wrong.  First on the list is the president of BP, who in an interview, was asked if he understood the devastation of people's lives caused by the oil gushing from their well in the Gulf.  He gave a thoughtful and long answer about knowing how farmers, fishermen, tourism industry workers, business owners, etc. all wanted their lives back and that BP was doing all that it could to facilitate that.  Then he made his fatal error; he added at the end that he would like his life back.  You'd have thought he committed public rape by the reaction. The news outlets took that last quote out of context omitting the rest of the answer and pundits on the left and right pounced!  Why, how dare he say he wanted his life back?!  Uh, well, wouldn't we all in the same situation?  And he only mentioned it at the end of a statement first expressing his horror at the lives affected by the spill.  And isn't that great motivation to get the job done?  Silly me, but I thought we wanted people who see the big picture and act.

Well, BP saw the carnage of that event and sent their Chairman, a Dutchman, to the rescue.  He unfortunately speaks English as a second language and lives in a culture where the press allows complete answers.  So he gave a response to essentially the same question by saying that BP cares about the lives of the "little people".  Again, the excrement hit the fan in full force! Why, the press and pundits went wild at the perceived arrogance of the answer.  Uh, hello, but I speak 6 languages and the only one where I get the colloquial usage right is English.  I can sort of handle it in Spanish, but the rest are pretty much textbook usage.  So if I were asked the same question in, say, France I would have given a pretty similar answer.  Not knowing the informal way to say "the average man" I might call them little people too.  For a hilarious rendition of this phenomenon, you need to run out and buy a copy of David Sedaris' book, "Me talk Pretty One Day", a collection of short stories that will make you belly laugh.  In it he describes taking French in France to settle in with his partner and the hilarious results.  Only for the poor Chairman of BP the results were not hilarious, just mean.  He meant well, but god forbid a fair treatment of what he said.  Again, a public lynching.

But neither of those examples caused the personal destruction that Shirley Sherrod faced this past week.  In case you missed it, Ms. Sherrod, an official of the USDA who happens to be black, was giving a speech before the NAACP that lasted 45 minutes.  It was largely a great speech, the story of growing up poor and black in the South, committing herself to only helping black people who she viewed as victims of White supremacy, and then later realizing that poor people come in every color and changing her outlook to include all the disadvantaged.  She shared the inspirational story of helping out a couple who was losing their farm who were white and being ignored by what she thought was their own people, intervening, and saving their farm. Well, the press true to form pounced on the one line in 45 minutes where she said she was only going to help blacks, completely out of context, and then in an ugly display of political cowardice, the Obama Administration fired her without doing a single fact check! And the right wing pundits not to be outdone were not only ugly and unfair, but just plain stupid in their attacks!

It was only after the white couple she saved stepped up to defend her that the president became aware of what was done and called her to apologize but only after a public lesson on why no one decent should ever utter a word in public.