The increasingly lame defenses of James O'Keefe
February 02, 2010 12:44 pm ET by Simon Maloy
I'd wager there aren't many people right now who would count themselves among James O'Keefe's supporters -- at least, far fewer than there were before he was arrested for entering Sen. Mary Landrieu's New Orleans office under false pretenses with the purpose of committing a felony. But what friends he does have left are doing their damndest to exonerate him in the court of public opinion. The problem is they clearly don't have a whole lot to work with.
Andrew Breitbart -- O'Keefe's patron and mentor -- got the ball rolling with the absurdly concocted smear that the U.S. attorney's office and the Justice Department conspired with the media to "frame" O'Keefe while he sat in a jail cell (a theory that O'Keefe himself did much to undermine). Breitbart's evidence for this allegation has been, well, nonexistent, though he would like to think that U.S. attorney Jim Letten's recusal from the case shows that he's on the right track. Unfortunately for him, Letten recused himself the day after the arrests were made -- days before Breitbart's conspiracy theory took shape.
And then there's Hannah Giles, O'Keefe's partner in the undercover ACORN "pimp" videos, who posted a missive on BigGovernment.com this morning lauding her colleague's actions in New Orleans for "strip[ping] away the MSM's mask of neutrality, revealing the bias below." Giles also informed us what she's learned from the whole situation: "the MSM is the primary force of the Democratic Party. If the MSM is lying to you, guess who else is? Someone has to feed them stories. Time and time again the MSM has been caught in a self-created web of lies, and the vast majority of these reports do one thing, and that is mask the true, ugly face of liberalism."
You can try and recast O'Keefe's arrest as some sort of heroic exposé of the mainstream media's alleged bias, but here's the thing -- there are great sectors of the right-wing new media that devote every waking moment to "exposing" the "bias" of the media, and they do so without getting arrested. She's praising him for risking jail time in order to achieve something the bias sleuths at NewsBusters claim to do (ineptly, I might add) every day. That's not "citizen journalism," that's stupidity.
Giles also accuses Landrieu's office of "vastly exaggerat[ing] the situation" and writes that "Landrieu's overreaction to O'Keefe's video project ought make [sic] the public wonder what the heck is actually going on in the office." According to Giles, the "overreaction" and "exaggeration" Landrieu is alleged to have engaged in was a statement from the senator reading: "This is a very unusual situation and somewhat unsettling for me and my staff. The individuals responsible have been charged with entering federal property under false pretenses for the purposes of committing a felony. I am as interested as everyone else about their motives and purpose, which I hope will become clear as the investigation moves forward."
So the senator is unsettled and curious as to why four men were arrested in her office, and accurately stated the charges filed against the alleged perpetrators. This counts as an "exaggerated" "overreaction"?
Anyway, Giles wrapped things up with a swipe at conservative blogger Michelle Malkin for, in Giles' words, "call[ing] for an example to be made out of [O'Keefe], and instructing other young journalists to not follow in his footsteps." There's not much that Michelle Malkin and I agree on, but we're on the same page when it comes to not teaching kids to get arrested in the name of political activism posing as journalism.
Think of Survivor - but the challenge is: who will be left when they start eating each other.
Note to Simon: "...got the boll rolling..." - I just can't cotton to this misspelling - unless you meant Uwe was buying the film rights?
Fox News is already smearing the prosecutor. An article published yesterday implies that the prosecutor recused himself because of charges made by Breitbart. It is all a lie which I rip apart here:
Fox News And Breitbart Smear O’Keefe Prosecutor.
They aren't pulling any punches. They charge the U.S. attorney with "framing" O'Keefe.
They must have something really awful to hide. Like maybe Breitbart's participation in the Landrieu affair - or even Glenn Beck or someone else at Fox.
They wouldn't want anyone to find out that "activist" journalist is actually a buzz word for lie, cheat, and steal to make your side look good. (e.g. It is all about partisan politics)
weevill see if he corrects it.
Sure, none of them seem to be able to come up with a crime to hang on individual employees, let alone ACORN as an organization, but I'm sure that in private wingnut conversation, they're still holding onto the Bizarro world view of this whole issue.
They may need a few days to be fed their talking points, but I imagine eventually the wingnuts will show up to entertain us with their version of O'Keefe's.... *ahem*... "video project".
Hannah Giles can't be dumber than all of the right wingers who post here, can she ?
The conspicuous and sudden absence of those who were swarming on past ACORN threads might possibly indicate that they're starting to catch on to O'Keefe's scam.
On the other hand, sometimes the more spectacular failures of their role models take a few days to scrap together some defense and talking points. Once that's done, the truly oblivious may show up to repeat their instructions.
It could go either way. The usual gang of wingnuts who post here may be smart enough that they've realized the attacks on ACORN were a low-level propaganda failure, or they may be so thick that they're just waiting to have somebody explain to them how they were right all along.
First, we presume that, while not particularly brilliant, the right-wing posters here do have SOME intelligence on the positive side of the scale which is normally used for tying shoes and chewing, but available for other purposes when the individual is not dressing or eating. At this point, there are alternative implimentations of our given hypothetical. 1) They could theoretically combine those minute positive intellectual elements and eventually construct a conclusion which roughly assimilates a natural truth of some sort. Or 2) They could individually use those minute positive intellectual elements for the purpose of achieving individual conclusions (a purpose for which said minute positive intellectual elements are inadequate), and then combine those misguided conclusions into a severely errant consensus.
In the case of #1, their combined minute positive intellectual elements could achieve a semblance of cognizance which exceeds that of Ms. Giles. It should be noted, however, that common observations of the right-wingers to ally, such as in their proclivity for common verbal rhetoric, is merely a manifestation of communal innate behavior - that they are all given the same tool to be used for the same purpose, and therefore while they seem to be in agreement, they are merely responding to their common circumstances with common reactions. There is no meeting of the minds outside the general approval that each neighbor is using their given tool for the exact same purpose. Examples of any practical application that would indicate that they recognize that different uses of the same tool could combine to create a secondary or even tertiary purpose are rare in the wild. This would lead the prudent individual to conclude that option #1, while not impossible, would have to indicate a change in the development of the right-winger characteristics, counter to their chosen environment, making option #2 is actually the more viable supposition.
...often use a common method of analysis either learned from attendance of continuing educational institutions or from practical lifetime experience to reach identical conclusions.
They are all over at biggovernment telling Hanna how much they love her and want to have her children.
So she went to her closet to grab an outfit.
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IMHO
Normal, rational people who recognize hypocrisy ? NO, of course not.
Delusional, fanatical victim-mentality, wannabe-martyr, ideologue criminals ? No problem.
This paragraph alone deserves the blogger's equivalent of the pulitzer.
Beautiful.
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O'Keefe is sofa king stupid it's not even funny.