What to do if you find yourself face-to-face with right-wing pretend journalist "Slimy Jim" O'Keefe (no, I mean stuff that's LEGAL)

Plus a quick note on the Zuccotti Park blitzkrieg --

DNAinfo.com caption: Sara Sitshul, 61, of Brooklyn said her son Chris O'Donnell, 23, was arrested last night. He was working in the kitchen at Occupy Wall Street. "The secrecy and organization of the arrests is just terrible."

Fortunately Howie in his late post tonight will have something to say about the storm-trooper clearing of the park undertaken under cover of darkness -- and with every effort made to minimize direct scrutiny by the outside world -- on orders from NYC's own personal plutocratic overlord, Mayor Mike. I can't tell you how much I don't want to write about this. I've been keeping up as best I can, and gathering links, and maybe will have something to say tomorrow.

Fortunately, Digby pretty well nailed the story before it happened, in a piece published yesterday on Aljazeera.com, "Militarising the police form Oakland to NYC." (The deck reads: "If the infrastructure of a police state is created, it's only a matter of time before those aggressive powers are used.") For more general information, you might try this link from cable news channel NY1, which was being updated through the day. And here's a 5:50pm ET DNAinfo.com link: "Occupy Wall Street Protesters Pour Back Into Zuccotti Park." -- Ken

NOW ON TO THE REAL POST . . .


You can watch this if you like. It's Columbia J-School Prof. Sree Sreenivasan's reverse-ambush of professional right-wing scumbag liar James "I Don't Have an Honest Bone in My Body" O'Keefe. I confess that I haven't watched it myself. I really, really don't enjoy watching vermin, or for that matter mounds of fecal droppings.

by Ken

So instead of writing about OWS, I'm going to write about Kim Kardashian's marital, er, woes. Ex-woes?

No, no, kidding. It's beyond my imagining why anyone would pay any attention at all to any Kardashian, though i have to say that viewing the clan as a sociological phenomenon I get a kick out of Marie Claire being stuck with a December cover story that was intended to be a "scoop" on Kim's giddily whirlwind marriage. (I read that they were able to squeeze in a reference to the awkward reality of her even whirlwindier divorce.)

OK, NOW ON TO THE REAL REAL POST

I thought instead I would pass on a charming and cheery story posted by Columbia U. J-School Dean of Student Affairs Sree Sreenivasan, who according to his DNAinfo.com bio "teaches in the digital journalism program." I've written before about my fondness for DNAinfo.com, a wonderful daily source for all sorts of "hyper-local" Manhattan news ("up-to-the-minute reports on entertainment, education, politics, crime, sports, and dining"), really getting down to the neighborhood level. But it wasn't till today that I discovered that Professor Sreenivasan is a contributing editor, each week offering one of "Sree's Tech Tips" (there's a linked list with that bio), of which the latest is "Five Things I Learned After Tangling With James O'Keefe."

Slimy Jim, Sree tells us, "showed up at Columbia Journalism School last week with mic in hand and cameras rolling to try to ask me questions about a colleague," which I gather is a polite way of saying that the little crapbrain had set his slanderous sights on someone exponentially worthier than his scummy self. "Fortunately, I recognized him," Sree writes. "Unlike his previous films, where he'd masqueraded as, among other things, a pimp, he was dressed journalist-style." Aha, an even more wildly improbably disguise than Slimy Jim's pimp getup. (As I've noted in the video-clip caption above, I haven't been able to bring myself to actually watch the little eff-er, but I' enormously tickled by the image conjured in this post comment from Susanna Speier: "Really was quite wonderful to see him retreating as you asked about his 'little outfits.'")

Sree, being after all a tech-savvy type, reacted promptly.

I pulled out my iPhone and started shooting him at the same time he was shooting me. Then a student started shooting video of me shooting O’Keefe shooting me, which he posted on YouTube. [Note: There are lots of links onsite.]

O'Keefe was on campus looking for material for his latest “To Catch a Journalist” segment for what he calls "Project Veritas," in which he goes after journalists for alleged misdeeds. In this case, he asked me about journalists using bad words in emails.

Gawker’s John Cook linked to the video and wrote about the incident on Thursday, which resulted in tens of thousands of people suddenly becoming aware of this. The whole thing also made the “Worst Persons” segment on the new “Countdown with Keith Olbermann” show on Current TV, with O’Keefe on the list.

As we'll see below, Sree hasn't been unalloyedly thrilled by the outpouring of attention this has produced. Nevertheless, I hope he won't mind my passing on what he describes as "some lessons worth learning from the incident. Here are the two I can't resist sharing:

1. IF SOMEONE AMBUSHES YOU WITH A CAMERA, AMBUSH ’EM BACK. If you get ambushed by someone with a video camera, pull out your camera phone and start filming. You end up intimidating them, not the other way around. And you have a full record of the incident, in case the other guy puts out a selectively edited version.

4. PEOPLE LIKE O’KEEFE THINK THEY ARE ACTING LIKE JOURNALISTS. They think having a camera makes them a journalist. Instead, this is a cheap caricature of journalism, down to the mic flag (you know, the “Project Veritas” logo attached to the microphone). He shows once again that ambush interviews and selective editing don’t make you into a citizen journalist.

And I would add to No. 4 the lesson I've cited so frequently which David Brock learned the hard way (and passed on in Blinded by the Right after becoming the young superstar of right-wing fake-journalism and finally coming to grips with the underlying fraud: that unlike actual journalists, who set out to get the story, the right-wing fake-journalists he'd been associated with started with a story concocted in their heads, out of their assorted delusions and obsessions, and then went out to find out what factoids and made-up stuff they could find find or twist into supporting it, doing their part for the Right-Wing Noise Machine.

As commenter Karen A. Johnson notes in response to Sree's piece: "People like O'Keefe and [his patron Andrew] Breitbart aren't embarrassed by their own sleaziness." To which Donna Morreale chimes in, "No they are actually proud of it," adding, "but if we expose them to everyone they will get less positive attention and people would understand they are nothing but a pile of bs."

I'll leave you to read about the other lessons onsite:

2. BEING EVEN IN A MINOR FIRESTORM IS IMMENSELY DISTRACTING.

3. ANYONE IN THE MEDIA CAN BE A TARGET THESE DAYS.

5. WANT MORE FOLLOWERS? BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR.

In connection with this last lesson, Sree writes, "Suddenly, I’ve found dozens of politics tweeters following me, including some from both extremes of the spectrum. None more famous, however, than Michelle Malkin and Andrew Breitbart." He adds, though: "I am hoping these political types, when they discover I almost never tweet about politics, will get bored and unfollow me. Let’s move along, folks, there’s nothing to see here."

#

Credit Michael Gerson with blowing the whistle on one aspect of the right-wing assault on truth

Yes, I know we just looked at this wonderful Lee Camp clip on Wednesday. Well, here it is again.

"O’Keefe did not merely leave a false impression; he manufactured an elaborate, alluring lie. . . . There is no ethical canon or tradition that would excuse such deception on the part of a professional journalist."

-- Michael Gerson, in his WaPo column today,
"The NPR video and political dirty tricks"

by Ken

The good news today is a reminder that at least around the edges of the hard-core Right there are occasional evidences of limits to the assault on reality and truth.

I really don't mean to go into the specifics of that crusade tonight. Goodness knows both Howie and I have already had plenty to say about that. However, I can recommend Paul Waldman's excellent piece for The American Prospect, "Crushing the Democrats' Base," which covers a lot of this territory, and argues that the Right is getting the better of the ongoing struggle because they think bigger and more decisively -- yet another demonstration of the point we we heard the other day from that dazzling funnyman Lee Camp: "Bad people have plans."

Here's Paul Waldman's basic premise:

Put simply, Republicans are conducting a radical attack on the Democratic Party, aimed at the roots of Democratic power and sustenance. The battle is occurring in Washington and around the country, and even if the right doesn't succeed completely, the fight will almost certainly leave Democrats weakened and defensive.

Look at the targets conservatives have taken aim at in the last couple of years: access to the ballot box, unions, organizations representing the poor, organizations protecting reproductive rights, and more. The assault is not just on ideas or policies (though there's plenty of that, too) but on the institutions that undergird the Democratic Party and the progressive movement.

It hasn't always been a tightly coordinated effort overseen by an authoritative hierarchy, but conservatives quickly moved into action at the right opportunities.

Among the specific his Paul goes on to talk about is the assault on ACORN, underpinned by then-rising right-wing dirtbag James O'Keefe's video orgy of lies. O'Keefe, of course, is a central figure in one of the current right-wing assaults on NPR, and it doesn't seem to matter how appalling his track record is. Even though he always, always lies, each time he drops another of his dirty bombs, instead of being greeted with catcalls and rotten tomatoes and cries of "Shame!," he's actually taken seriously.

By now we know the drill. Just wait a bit, until people who aren't known pathological liars get access to the video materials he's tricked up and show how he's done his dirty work -- too late, of course, to even limit, let alone undercut, the damage. It's a measure of how weak-kneed NPR is that the organization just kind of rolled over, presumably hoping that the quick resignations of the two Schillers would allow the manufactured scandal to just sort of go away. Which was crazy, because just-sort-of-going-away is exactly what the rampaging Right did not have in mind for the broadside against NPR, which ironically actually bends over backward to be "fair and balanced," in contrast to that other broadcast organization that's gotten so much mileage out of pretending to be while conducting an unadulterated propaganda war.

I keep making the point that the current-day Right has a seemingly unassailable advantage in having gone off the reality standard, that being a modern-day conservative has come to mean not just a total disregard for truth but an unmitigated militant all-encompassing hatred for the truth. And of course when you're sitting on the Right's other major strategic advantage, the seemingly limitless gazillions of dollars available for its crusades against truth, those crusades take on a pretty high likelihood of success.

Which is why it matters, at least a little, when one of the Far Right's trustier sideline enthusiasts blows the whistle. Now Michael Gerson is known for occasionally parting company with the hardest-core loonies of the movement, as I've had a number of occasions to note here. He actually does have an ethical streak. Most of the time he's able to keep it in check and soldier on with his cheerleading for vicious, sociopathic ideologues. And of course even when he takes a stand at variance with most of his ideological brethren, there's always enough weaseling to compromise the point.

But this is still a pretty tough piece. He lays out pretty clearly how outrageously and intentionally dishonest O'Keefe's video editing was, and does a thoughtful job of exploring "deeper issues about the ethics of undercover journalism" he thinks this latest episode raises.

Oh sure, predictably Gerson does a certain amount of right-wing whitewashing. And so, while countering the claim of O'Keefe's defenders "that he is not really a journalist but a new breed of 'citizen journalist'" leads Gerson into some interesting thoughts about the subject of "citizen journalism" (including the conclusion, "These tactics are not a new brand of gonzo journalism. They are a sophisticated version of the political dirty trick"), he might at least have noted in passing that this is not, in fact, O'Keefe's claim. Every time he drops one of his video dirty bombs, he can be heard intoning into all those microphones pointed at him (surely a major object of the exercise) that he's simply using accepted journalistic techniques.

Similarly, in considering "the popular justification" for behavior like O'Keefe's -- "that the other side does it" -- he is dishonestly "even-handed." Yes, there are lots of awful Democratic pols and strategists, and we write about them a lot here at DWT. But they really are modeling themselves on their Republican counterparts, and there are still lots of Dems who don't do this, and many others who try to keep it to a minimum. Contrast this with the all but exception-free run of present-day Republicans, among whom (sorry to have to keep saying this, but doesn't somebody have to?) the only applicable standard of truth is what makes the beholder feel good to pretend is true.

And so, in the following statement, which on the whole represents a bracingly outspoken stand, lumping together as "equal and opposite abuses" what O'Keefe does and "a liberal journalist call[ing] Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin pretending to be a conservative donor, fishing for incriminating quotes" amounts to, well, kind of a flagrant lie. The liberal journalist didn't have to do much fishing; he simply made Walker feel comfortable saying what he clearly actually believes. He would have a tough time claiming that he was in any way misrepresented Was a line crossed? Yes. But that isn't remotely equivalent to Gerson's own characterization of O'Keefe's activity in the anti-NPR travesty: manufacturing an elaborate lie.

That said, this remains a strong statement:

Abuses are employed as excuses for equal and opposite abuses. The result is more than a race to the murky journalistic bottom. It is the triumph of a thoroughly postmodern view of politics: Power means everything. Truth means little. Ethical standards are for the weak and compromised. Influence is gained, not by persuasion, but by deception and ruthlessness.

This escalation is really a descent.

Again, it would be nice to have some recognition that what Gerson is describing became standard operating practice for Republicans by the time of the Bush regime, under the tactical leadership of people like Karl Rove and Tom DeLay (with much of theoretical underpinning for the "deception and ruthlessness" being supplied by opportunistic consultants, more often than not Frank Luntz), nevertheless, these are words that deserve to live and be reheard periodically, even if all too often they'll come up again in connection with people Gerson has gone back to cheering on.

#

Kirsten Gillibrand Stood Up To The Right Wing Scam Artists Who Targeted ACORN And Landrieu

Scam artist James O'Keefe III with would be hooker Hannah Giles

You've no doubt heard about how the Fox/Republican ACORN scam blew up in their faces today. DWT readers saw the joke in real time, last September when James O'Keefe and his crack team pulled one over on people who love to have something pulled over on them-- especially when it makes progressives look as bad as they are themselves and they imagine everyone else is as well.

Back then Senator Mike Johanns and his right-wing colleagues couldn't wait to jump all over ACORN and smear them with all that Glenn Beck nonsense that so fascinated the mainstream media for a week or three. In fact, on September 14, Johanns' amendment, S.Amdt 2355, "prohibiting use of funds to fund the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) passed 83-7, craven disgraces to the Democratic Party like Evan Bayh, Blanche Lincoln, Arlen Specter, Ben Nelson, Dianne Feinstein, Claire McCaskill rushing to buy into the trumped up demands of the far right as fast and loudly as they could. At that time only seven out of the huge Democratic majority had the intestinal fortitude to stand up and call "bullshit" on this scam-- Roland Burris (D-IL), Bob Casey (D-PA), Dick Durbin (D-IL), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI). That was a pretty gutsy, even heroic, vote at the time-- especially for the only one of the 7 up for re-election this year (Gillibrand) and looking even better today. I wonder how Landrieu feels.

There was another amendment besides Johanns', I want to bring up, this one by lunatic fringe GOP dirtbag, Pete Olson (R-TX), which attempted to honor O'Keefe and his accomplices. Nothing ever happened with it, but Olson did manage to find 31 crazy co-sponsors to go along for the ride: Todd Akin (R-MO), Roscoe Bartlett (R-MD), Joe Barton (R-TX), Rob Bishop (R-UT), Jo Bonner (R-AL), John Boozman (R-AR), Paul Broun (R-GA), Henry Brown (R-SC), John Campbell (R-CA), John Carter (R-TX), Howard Coble (R-NC), Tom Cole (R-OK), Michael Conaway (R-TX), John Culberson (R-TX), Mary Fallin (R-OK), closet queen Trent Franks (R-AZ), Louie Gohmert (R-TX), Kay Granger (R-TX), Ralph Hall (R-TX), Jim Jordan (R-OH), Steve King (R-IA), John Kline (R-MN), Doug Lamborn (R-CO), Blaine Luetkemeyer (R-MO), Daniel Lungren (R-CA), Kenny Marchant (R-TX), cultist Joseph Pitts (R-PA), who today claimed he'd never heard of O'Keefe, Bill Posey (R-FL), Phil Roe (R-TN), Mean Jean Schmidt (R-OH), and John Shadegg (R-AZ). Lotta Texas Crazy in that lot! And how did they forget Michele Bachmann and Virginia Foxx?

Anyway, in honor of Gillibrand's foresight and brave stand, I thought I'd share a little clip from Colbert's show with you tonight:

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Alpha Dog of the Week - Harold Ford Jr.
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Economy

UPDATE: The Accomplices-- 3 Conservative Activists

Media Matters introduces O'Keefe's partners in crime: all lowlife movement conservatives, Joseph Basel, Robert Flanagan (son of William Flanagan, the acting U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Louisiana), and notorious right-wing fanatic Stan Dai.