Sometimes the good guys do win. Ryan Cooper, at the Washington Monthly, on “The Divergent Fates of Sarah Palin and Shirley Sherrod“:
With the recent retirement of Sarah Palin from her grotesquely lucrative career as a Fox commentator, I immediately thought of another person who was inadvertently catapulted to national prominence: Shirley Sherrod (backstory here). Not to compare the content of their thoughts or ideologies, of course, just the trajectory of their lives. Because Sherrod could have easily parleyed her burst of fame into one of those sumptuous TV commentator/author/lecturer careers, abandoning all her previous work and crisscrossing the country to give milquetoast addresses to executive retreats.
But she did not. Instead, even after both she and a nonprofit she works for got a sizable settlement from the USDA for discrimination in decades past, she didn’t change much. She still does the same thing she’s always done: help poor farmers in rural Georgia, where she grew up. I interviewed her for our latest issue…
Ms. Sherrod’s book, The Courage to Hope, is due out in paperback this summer, and is available for Kindle now.