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…
Footnotes:- 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… [↩]
- well, not really, if you have an iota of memory of the history of political theatre in the US [↩]
- or sickened [↩]