Olbermann: Debunking Breitbart's 'Occupy Rape List'
Keith Olbermann takes apart one of Andrew Breitbart's latest smears of the Occupy movement that we all sadly got a dose of the other night when he was screaming at the protesters outside of CPAC; that the movement is full of rapists.
Debunking Breitbart's "Occupy Rape List":
What you have not seen are the facts behind the transparently dishonest "list" with which Breitbart is trying to smear Occupy as rapists. Sadly, it appears his people's efforts consisted of finding stories in which both the word "Occupy" and some report of sexual misconduct.
It doesn't look like anybody bothered to read the links. Nearly every one of the stories shows Occupy participants were the victims and not the alleged perpetrators, or the incidents had nothing to do with Occupy.
You can read the entire list and the details in Keith's post at KOS, but here's the summation:
So. Seventeen stories Breitbart claims are cases of Rape at Occupy. Just reading the stories, googling the names of those identified, following up - this only took me about 70 minutes. The final result:
-- Two stories on the list were duplicates.
-- One story turns out to have been about consensual sex.
-- One case, in Scotland, led the Occupy group to disband for the sake of safety.
-- One case of an arrest for child porn, with Occupy immediately banning the alleged perpetrator.
-- One case of a girl disappearing -- ignoring the fact that she was home and unharmed a month later.
-- Four cases in which police said neither the victim nor the assailant were apparently even associated with Occupy.That leaves seven others stories, all of which show police identifying Occupy participants as the victims, six of which show police identifying the alleged assailants as not being Occupy participants.
That is the evidence that Andrew Breitbart has submitted to rationalize his irrational attempt to smear the Occupy movement and Occupy members, as rapists, and to brand anybody who points out his dishonesty, his twisting of the facts, and who bothers to actually read the stories that disprove his own contention, as a rape denier or rape apologist. What Mr. Breitbart and his fellow propagandists have done, in fact, is to take at least eight women, eight members of Occupy, who were raped or otherwise assaulted, and blamed them.
But he is not just perpetrating the classic fabrication con of the dishonest man for whom facts are malleable and can be ignored when they are inconvenient. More importantly, Breitbart is exploiting rape victims, blaming rape victims. And no woman, no man - conservative, liberal, or indifferent - can abide this despicable attempt to take individual human suffering, and by lying at the top of his voice, try to score cheap political points.