pardee

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mike madigan watergate fred thompson

Mixed Bizness

s first foray into group blogging was, naturally, Big Hollywood in 2008. But he didn’t fully emerge from the shadows of his old collaborators, Huffington and Drudge, until the fall of 2009, when he launched Big Government off the propulsive energy of James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles’s hidden-camera “sting” against the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN).

For years, ACORN’s successful get-out-the-vote efforts had brought it into the crosshairs of Republican campaign apparatchiks who saw the organization as an acute threat: a demographically advantageous increase in voter turnout, particularly among minorities and the poor, that largely favored their Democratic opponents.

The depth, convolution, and spuriousness of the accusations thrown at ACORN in the wake of Obama’s 2008 presidential victory primed many conservatives for this deceptively packaged footage.

But ironically, it only dimly informed the production of the videos themselves.O’Keefe said in his memoir Breakthrough that he barely knew anything about ACORN prior to the operation, other than harboring “a deep suspicion” based on one news clip of Baltimore ACORN activists protesting unfair banking practices by squatting in foreclosed homes.

Giles copped to the same level of ignorance on Hannity, telling Fox News viewers, “We didn’t know about them before we came up with the idea, really.”

In his own memoir, Righteous Indignation, Breitbart also confessed to a cavalier disengagement with the subject:

In June 2009, I didn’t know much about the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). My attitude toward it was a generic conservative’s attitude: I knew that the lack of interest the mainstream media were showing in ACORN — especially with all the accusations leveled against it regarding its illegal voter fraud and ties with the Democratic Party — meant that there had to be something really, truly horrific about it.

To put the level of self-reported incompetence into context here, a LexisNexis search of print stories mentioning ACORN produces 4,468 articles from January 2007 to December 2008, right through the presidential race. Of these, 1,737 were published in October 2008 in the run-up to the election, and the majority of those stories dealt with the voter fraud allegations.

It’s little wonder that O’Keefe and Giles were forced to pay $100,000 and $50,000 settlements, respectively, in defamation suits brought against them by an unjustly fired ACORN employee.

When Breitbart released a similarly skewed video of US Department of Agriculture official Shirley Sherrod, excerpted from her speech at an NAACP event, he too was forced to settle adefamation suit(albeit posthumously).

Valuable resources have been, could be, and still should be, expended on fact-checking the dense feed of misinformation discharged from Breitbart’s content mill — but journalistic methods have never been one of the salient details explaining the organization’s rise to prominence.

Those salient details have been, in ascending order of importance: Andrew Breitbart’s unique aesthetic of confrontational punditry and the cult of personality it engendered; the effective abandonment of working-class constituencies by both of America’s major political parties accompanied by the diffusion of middle-class, white America’s economic frustrations into scapegoats; and a long-gestating hostile takeover of the Republican Party by Libertarians Charles and David Koch and their billionaire donor’s club which — after three decades of deliberate chess moves, primarily in the form of bad-faith charitable giving — finally bore fruit in the 2010 midterm elections with the Tea Party wave.[huh?]

The career of Mike Flynn, the man Breitbart tapped to helm Big Government in 2009, almost perfectly demonstrates the confluence of these forces.

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