When will Breitbart apologize for the phony O'Keefe/pimp-dressing ACORN story? I've been writing a lot about this story as has Neiwert and many others because it reminded us what "ratf*&king is all about. O'Keefe is Breitbart's Nixonian hit man.
And Brietbart pays the man a salary don't forget.
Eric Boehlert writes a great piece on Breitbart and the phony pimp story:
Last September, when the ACORN scandal that his website helped launch was breaking in the press, Andrew Breitbart wrote a column for The Washington Times detailing the rollout of the undercover, right-wing gotcha. He recalled a 2009 meeting with "filmmaker and provocateur James O'Keefe" that took place in Breitbart's office in June. It was there that O'Keefe played the columnist the surreptitiously recorded videos he'd made with his sidekick, Hannah Giles, and which captured the two famously getting advice from ACORN workers on how prostitutes could skirt tax laws.
In his Times column, Breitbart was quite clear about what he saw that day in his office: He watched videos of O'Keefe "dressed as a pimp" sitting inside ACORN offices "asking for -- and getting -- help" from the misguided employees.
But today we know that's almost certainly not true. Breitbart didn't huddle in his office and watch clips of O'Keefe "dressed as a pimp" chatting with ACORN employees, because based on all the available evidence, O'Keefe wasn't dressed as a pimp while taping inside the ACORN offices.
Make no mistake: Last fall, both Breitbart and O'Keefe, with the help of Fox News, did their best to confuse people about that fact. It's true the duo seemed to purposefully push that falsehood and mislead the public and the press about the ACORN story. And more importantly, they did it to make the ACORN workers captured on video look like complete jackasses for not being able to spot O'Keefe's pimp ruse a mile away.
But the story was not true...read on
Breitbart is a wanker for pushing the obvious lies, but the media and Congress were also duped and made to look like fools.
This story is important. There's a long tradition of undercover muckraking that's initiated many an important social change in this country. But this isn't muckraking, it's political theatre. The level of cynical deception in this "story" runs several layers deeper than anything I've ever seen before, tapping into some really nasty, subterranean veins of stereotype, prejudice and racism --- on everyone's part --- to make what ends up being a completely distorted point.
The fact that what should have been instantly seen as an obviously absurd proposition was taken at face value even by the US congress and the major media institutions of this country should inform us a little bit about how tenuous our racial progress might just be. This was a shameful episode deserving of more scrutiny than it's gotten so far...read on
Congress should immediately reinstate funds to ACORN. This knee-jerk action by Congress was a travesty.
