I spend so much of my life angry at various people that it is hard to know how to react when I am angry even by that standard. Actually, I have good news. But buried inside it is an appalling revelation. This all has to do with someone who I think is at the very top of the list when it comes to the most evil and vile people in America: Jame O’Keefe—a man who shockingly still commands respect in the mainstream media.

I’m sure you remember O’Keefe’s amazingly successful sliming of ACORN. In the end, it turned out that everything O’Keefe claimed about the group was wrong and based upon deceptive editing. Leave it the Democratically controlled Congress to destroy the group based upon this right wing hit job. If I were O’Keefe, I would have been pleased as hell. After all, he did nothing to prove that the group was bad. All the work was done by insipid Democratic legislators who don’t believe in a damned thing.

The worst part of O’Keefe’s hit job was what he did to Juan Carlos Vera. He was the guy, who when O’Keefe came into his office obviously talking about the slave sex trade, took down as much information as he could. After O’Keefe left, Vera called the police and set them in action regarding this illegal activity. Of course, O’Keefe didn’t care about that. He had Vera on video apparently helping the idiot young man continue on with his nefarious activities.

So not only did Vera lose his job—like all ACORN employees; he also got so much bad publicity that he was effectively unemployable. As a result of this, he sued O’Keefe for $75,000. Yesterday, he was awarded $100,000 settlement. Think about it: this is a deal from the perspective of O’Keefe’s conservative backers; only $100,000 to get rid of the generally highly ethical and effective ACORN. Again: all they needed were a bunch of spineless Democratic politicians—many of whom owed their positions to ACORN organizing.

According to the settlement which Wonkette managed to get its hands on:

This is either untrue or irrelevant. If O’Keefe was unaware of Vera turning the information he gathered over the the police, it is only because he was willfully so. His work was treated as journalism. Journalism requires meeting up with people you accuse. Had he done so, Vera would have told him this. O’Keefe would have been compelled to check with the police. The police would have told him that this was true. O’Keefe would have had to remove Vera from his video. But he didn’t do that, because O’Keefe is not a journalist; he is a Republican political operative. And as such, the media should have treated his allegations the same way they would treat any politician’s claim.

I am very happy for Mr. Vera. But justice has most certainly not been served. O’Keefe has certainly done far more damage than this to Vera. What’s more, O’Keefe should be in jail. He should be a national pariah; he should be worse than Saddam Hussein. Instead, he is at large, being well paid to work his nefarious magic to try to bring down other liberal institutions. In general, his attempts have been pathetic. But for some reason, the major media still treat him as though he were a journalist. But I can see their difficulty: it is so rare that they have any contact with actual journalists, they don’t really know what they look like.