There’s an old saying in Texas: Fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again. Drudge and the far-right media have been suckered into promoting another James O’Keefe prank, taking the fraudster at face-value despite his lengthy track-record of selectively edited videos. This time, O’Keefe tackled the immigration issue, but before we jump into it, let’s review O’Keefe’s greatest hits.
–ACORN – His original claim to fame was a 2009 video in which he dressed up as a pimp and attempted get advice from low-level ACORN workers about evading taxes. The news media widely debunked the videos proving they were selectively edited to make it seem as if the workers were guilty. The fraudulent nature of the videos hasn’t stopped the House Republicans from voting to de-fund ACORN dozens of times, even after ACORN shut-down its operations amid the non-scandal. O’Keefe’s financier, Andrew Breitbart admitted the hoax: “So I’m going to have to stage a series of tricks to get the mainstream media to have to pay attention to it. So that’s what I did. I admit it, I tricked you.”
–NPR – O’Keefe released another video in which he claimed that NPR executives agreed to meet with representatives from the infamous Muslim Brotherhood about donating money to the organization. The video appeared to show an NPR executive, Ron Schiller, observing that the tea party is driven by xenophobia and race, and its leaders employ race as a wedge. Two of NPR’s top executives including Schiller were fired. But amazingly, Glenn Beck’s The Blaze outed the video as having been selectively edited. And yet, once again, the House Republicans ignored the debunking and voted to de-fund NPR, based on O’Keefe’s scam.
–Planned Parenthood – An O’Keefe co-conspirator, Lila Rose, carried out another pimp-style prank video, this time against Planned Parenthood. What happened? Take a guess. The video was heavily edited, but that didn’t stop the House Republicans from voting dozens of times to de-fund Planned Parenthood.
See the pattern here? To be clear: the congressional votes were in direct response to O’Keefe’s videos in spite of being debunked by both the right and the left. See our previous post on President Obama’s observation about the GOP’s difficulties with “fact-based, reason-based” positions.
This leads us to O’Keefe’s latest… CONTINUE READING