Mediaite's Tommy Christopher weighs in on Andrew Breitbart's “evidence” that several Congressmen are lying about tea partiers hurling racial epithets at them at the U.S. Capitol Building in March:

Earlier this week, conservative media figure Andrew Breitbart seized upon a New York Times story correction as proof that Civil Rights hero John Lewis (D-Ga) and others were “lying” when they claimed that a crowd of protesters had hurled the “n-word” at them as they walked to the Capitol to vote on health care reform.

Breitbart supports his claim by submitting “conclusive” video “evidence” that nothing “racially charged” occurred on March 20, 2010. I took a closer look at the NY Times correction, and Breitbart's video, and it doesn't take much to poke some pretty big holes in Breitbart's basic claim, which somehow presupposes that the failure to meet a burden of proof is, in and of itself, “conclusive evidence.”

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Instead, Breitbart offered the thinnest refutation possible: there was no video of the incident. He was presumably able to do this perhaps due to the expectation that the mainstream media, cowed by their embarrassment at his hands over the ACORN controversy, to go along with it, or at least accept the premise that a lack of video evidence was somehow an equal counterbalance to the testimony of three members of Congress. Or that such evidence is somehow a prerequisite to reporting a story. By the way, that's going to make a lot of print reporters very unhappy.

Sadly, this premise echoes the voice of every stereotypically racist sheriff in the 60's who ever uttered “Nobody's gonna believe you, boy!” Ironically, it also echoes the white grand jury who refused to indict the murderer of Shirley Sherrod's father.

Breitbart now presents several crudely-shot, 5 to 7 second video clips of poor audio quality as proof positive that nothing happened that day. Although that idea is, at best thin on its face, even those cherry-picked snippets contain proof that Breitbart's “proof” is in fact, false.

Included in his post is a video you won't want to miss with some tough questions for Breitbart.