Tag: ACORN

Yee godz, I hope the terrorist wannabe¹ James O’Keefe goes to jail for a long, long time.

Fact: On the guerilla clips posted online and aired on Fox News, O’Keefe was featured in lots of cutaway shots that were filmed outside and showed him parading around with Giles in his outlandish cane/top hat/sunglasses/fur coat pimp costume.

The cutaway shots certainly left the impression that that’s how O’Keefe was dressed when he spoke to ACORN workers.

But inside each and every office, according to one independent review that looked at the public videos, O’Keefe entered sans the pimp get-up. In fact, he was dressed rather conservatively. During his visit to the Baltimore ACORN office, he wore a dress shirt and khaki pants. For the Philadelphia sting, he added a tie to the ensemble.

Instead, the ’70s-era, blacksploitation pimp costume was a propaganda tool used to later deceive the public about the undercover operation. It was a prop that was quickly embraced by the mainstream media and turned into a central part of the ACORN story.

It’s true that Giles was seen on the ACORN office tapes scantily clad as she discussed her future prostitution plans with ACORN workers. But it was the pimp costume, or the idea that O’Keefe was sitting there getting ACORN advice while decked out in it, that really hit the laughter button and caused the press — and public — to guffaw at ACORN’s apparent cluelessness. Read: Not only were the ACORN employees morally suspect for doling out tax advice to a would-be prostitute, but the low-income advocates were dumb as stumps to boot!

[Click to continue reading James O’Keefe and the myth of the ACORN pimp | Media Matters for America]

Amazingly² the corporate media has endlessly repeated, breathlessly, as if the facts were just as idiot O’Keefe described them. Click the URL link above if you want to be amused³ by the gullibility of the 4th Estate…

1. just imagine for a second that an Arab Muslim, in full desert regalia, attempted to wire-tap the office of a Republican member of the Homeland Security committee. Right, there would be 25 hours of outrage each and every day until the offender was waterboarded into confessing he killed Millard Fillmore. But since Senator Landrieu’s affiliation is with the Democratic Party… [↩]
2. well, not really, if you have an iota of memory of the history of political theatre in the US [↩]
3. or sickened [↩]

ACORN is not the problem, FOX News¹ is

The Washington Post’s Darryl Fears and Carol D. Leonnig describe “The $1,300 mission to fell ACORN.” It started with a phone call to James O’Keefe III (the “pimp”) from Hannah Giles (the “prostitute”), daughter of a conservative blogger named Doug Giles. The plan from the very beginning was to damage the reputation of the organization. O’Keefe admits that his enmity for ACORN derived from its success helping Democrats win elections, not from any charges of corruption. The Post also points out that in Philadelphia ACORN employees called the police when the duo left the offices there. The videotape of that encounter has yet to be released, and so the prevailing image of ACORN in the mainstream media has been the one that the video makers, with a vendetta against the organization, wanted out there.

Hysterical Fox News commentators have blown this story up like a hot air balloon, and much of the rest of the media appear to believe that what Fox says goes. Andrew Alexander complains that “traditional news outlets like The Post simply don’t pay enough attention to conservative media or viewpoints.” But writing in the Columbia Journalism Review, Rick Perlstein responds: “Why would a newspaper like the The Post be training its investigative focus on ACORN now? Whether you think ill or well of ACORN, they’re a very marginal group in the grand scheme of things and about as tied to the White House as the PTA.”

This right-wing stunt proved such powerful catnip to mainstream media bigfeet that amazingly, George Stephanopoulos thought it worth discussing with the President of the United States during a rare one-on-one interview opportunity. The president quite understandably explained that that he wasn’t following the story very closely, and that the country was dealing with more serious problems right now. (U.S. grants to ACORN, already suspended, account for literally 52 seconds of annual U.S. government spending, according to one careful estimate.) Stephanopoulos had nothing else to say. As though he were correcting himself, he continued, “Afghanistan is a serious problem facing the country right now.” Oh, yeah, Afghanistan….

[Click to continue reading Think Again: Falling for the Far Right’s ACORN Agenda]

Constantly amazed at how pliable the news media is to whatever is the Right Wing smear-de-jour. Sickeningly familiar from constant repetition.

1. and their masters [↩]