As Andrew Breitbart recounts in his excellent new book Righteous Indignation, when James O’Keefe first showed him a series of tapes in which he and Hannah Giles had posed as a pimp and a prostitute successfully requesting help from ACORN to set up brothels for their 14-year-old El Salvadoran sex slaves, James turned to Andrew and said, “We’re going to take down ACORN.” Andrew responded, “No. We’re going to take down the media.”
And sure enough and ever since, with every video James, Andrew, Hannah, Lila Rose and I have released exposing corruption, fraud, waste, hypocrisy, racism, and socialism within the institutional left, the mainstream media has swarmed with haste like mosquitoes to a bug-zapper in an effort to discredit us – only to, in so doing, discredit themselves. It has truly been a laugh riot to observe.
As Saul Alinsky would have it, they have picked us as targets, frozen us, personalized us, and attempted to polarize us by attaching winning catch-terms out of their apparently limited vocabulary: “hoax,” “racist,” “heavily-edited.”
I covered the MSM’s reaction to the ACORN tapes in column after column. After the tapes were released, a tax-payer funded community organization giving tax fraud advice to a couple with an underage human trafficking ring didn’t matter – as Rachel Maddow addressed the real question: Was James wearing his grandmother’s chinchilla inside the offices, or just the B-roll? And of course my pal Tommy Christopher of Mediaite.com and Max Blumenthal of Salon.com wanted to know, was James’ pimp outfit meant to imply “racial overtones”? Courage, guys.
When James was arrested in New Orleans for entering an office open to the public to see if Sen. Mary Landrieu’s staffers would confirm or deny that the senator’s phone lines were indeed jammed as Landrieu had claimed in the midst of constituent outrage over her nefarious “Lousiana Purchase” deal, our friends at MSNBC wasted no time in preempting the New Orleans federal district court to deliver the verdict: It was “Watergate, Jr.,” the intent was to “wiretap,” and “tamper with the phone lines,” and that’s all you need to know – please, no follow-up questions, moving on …
After James and I released “Teachers Unions Gone Wild,” exposing voter fraud, misappropriation of public funds, racism and bad faith negotiating, Media Matters insisted the soundbites were deceptively mismatched. After I released raw footage disproving this charge, I was then accused of hiring an actress (with uncannily identical vocal chords) to ADR specific parts of the actual spoken sentences. Yes, the conspiracy theory had officially reached meth addict status, yet this was somehow good enough for Media Matters and the Star Ledger.
When I released footage of left-wing union demonstrators at a Common Cause rally in Palm Springs calling for the lynching of Clarence Thomas, (drastically inconveniencing the left’s anti-conservative post-Tucson narrative), Tommy Christopher once again swooped in for the save, accusing me of “egging them on” (apparently, wherever Tommy comes from, every normal person is just an “egging on” away from letting out their inner Bull Connor).
The Center for Media and Democracy then accused me of staging the event with an ensemble cast, as they pointed out that my subjects “looked to be wearing wigs or disguises.” It was then that I actually found myself taking offense on behalf of those I had exposed. I mean, it’s one thing to be exposed as foaming-at-the-mouth racists, but to be called wig-clad sideshow freaks on top of it? Jeez.
The Daily Kos and CrooksandLiars.com used this same narrative against Andrew and myself shortly thereafter — when we exposed physicians committing illegal fraud to abet delinquent, self-interested union teachers in Madison, Wisconsin — and were promptly, and brilliantly satirized by Mike Flynn.
In James’ latest NPR investigation, NPR’s narrative was that the Muslim Brotherhood’s $5,000,000,000 donation was “rejected.” Well, James swiftly shut that one down with his subsequent release of video exposing that as a blatant lie. Whoops!
There is simply no imaginable incentive to point the fingers at us–the investigators–rather than the subjects of our investigations, aside from ideological alliance thereto and consequent, understandable protective impulses.
Mainstream media: We have shared quite a bizarre dance with you the past year and a half, and have recognized that it won’t end any time soon. So enjoy our little commemorative paean to it. This is our ode to you.
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