I have a visceral hatred of James O’Keefe. You should know him as the con man who managed to get ACORN defunded by pretending to be an ethical investigator. His work has never shown what he has claimed, and the press could never be bothered to check out his claims before reporting them. My hatred is not primarily about the effects of his work. It is rather that as partisan as I may be, I still have a commitment to the truth. It bothers me when people try to finesse an argument. But when they knowing lie — in a way where it absolutely goes past any question of self-delusion — I go crazy. It doesn’t help that O’Keefe has been shown to be a fraud time and again, yet mainstream news still treat him as though he had something to offer. You don’t need any other information to conclude that such news sources are primarily interested entertainment.
These days, James O’Keefe is more known for sting operations that get revealed. For example, there was his creepy attempt to make some kind of a secret sex video of his attempted seduction of CNN reporter Abbie Boudreau. But most recently, he’s been sniffing around Colorado where he’s been trying to entrap the Democratic Party with his typically obvious stunts. Here is Andy Kroll at Mother Jones, Colorado Dems: We Caught James O’Keefe and His Friends Trying to Bait Us Into Approving Voter Fraud:
On Friday, Udall campaigned with Sen Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) on the University of Colorado-Boulder campus. After the event, a woman calling herself “Bonnie” approached a different staffer and, according to this staffer’s boss, asked whether she could fill out and submit blank ballots found in a garbage can. The staffer, according to her boss, said that she told her no.
That same day, the guy identifying himself as “Nick Davis” returned to the Democratic office in Boulder. He was accompanied by a man wearing heavy makeup and a mustache, according to the Democratic staffer who had met Davis three days earlier. Davis introduced his friend as a “civics professor” at the University of Colorado-Boulder and the faculty adviser to Rocky Mountain Vote Pride. Davis and the professor, who said his name was “John Miller,” picked up Udall campaign literature and canvassing information.
Rocky Mountain Vote Pride is pretty clearly a fake group. Their URL is held through a privacy company — not something that a grassroots group would do, but very much what an astroturf group would. It was created only on 10 July of this year and as the article noted, there is no contact information on the site. And I’ll add this: it looks exactly like just about every other astroturf website I’ve ever seen.
The “civics professor” wearing heavy makeup was James O’Keefe as shown in the photo above. O’Keefe tweeted it out himself, probably because his attempt to apparently plant incriminating evidence at the nonprofit group New Era Colorado was foiled. The tweet claimed, “I went in Disguised as 45yo, this time people may lose their jobs.” This time?! Like thousands of people didn’t lose their jobs as a result of his ACORN con?
Regardless of all this, what I think is interesting is just how unsubtle O’Keefe is. I think this is because as a Republican, he just assumes that the other side must be as unethical as they are. Consider voter fraud. Republicans are the only ones pushing it as a big deal. Yet the only major cases of it recently have been perpetrated by Republicans. So I don’t doubt that Republicans think voter fraud is a big deal; they know they’re okay with it. And O’Keefe thinks that Democrats must be just chomping at the bit — waiting for a college student to come in and suggest that they ought to vote for people who have moved away.
This is the state of Republican thought. The truth is that O’Keefe’s exploits are an embarrassment. They are very much akin to the John Birch Society and Robert Welch’s The Politician. But that caused the Republican establishment — National Review most especially — to turn on the group. But the Republican Party and the conservative movement more generally has lost all grip of what a republic is all about. This is why I call them proto-fascists: all that matters is power. And as long as the mainstream media are gullible enough to believe James O’Keefe’s newest scam, he will be embraced as a hero. Because he helps the Republican Party gain power. To hell with the truth.
Afterword
O’Keefe claims that big things are coming in the next week. And what are we likely to see: a heavily edited video with comments taken out of context. It will ultimately be the same thing it always is: nothing. But that doesn’t mean that it won’t get a lot of coverage.
