Tea Party Crashing
Feb 7, 2010 Breitbart, James O'Keefe, Sarah Palin 2012, Sarahpalooza, Teh Train Wreck™, The Teabagger Fail, sarah palin
Gaylord. Heh. Sumptuous digs for a "populist" movement.
Well, last night was interesting.
I needed to be in Nashville yesterday anyway, so I crashed the tea party at the Gaylord (heh!) Grand Ole Opry Hotel and Convention Center to catch as much video as possible. I went as a citizen journalist with every intention of promoting my work via Huffington Post in all probability, but in the form of You Tube video that will be available elsewhere (including, and especially, my own website).
I introduced myself as Matt Osborne to everyone who asked. No one asked if I was with a media organization, including the woman who eventually “threw me out,” until Sarah’s speech was over and I was literally leaving the way I’d come. I got silent video of convention participants and Judge Roy Moore of Ye Ten Commandments. I talked to “media colleagues” and got samples of the propaganda. Though I was refused entry to the ballroom to so much as take a photo of Sarah, I watched a little of her speech on somebody’s laptop.
After getting shots through the wide-open banquet hall doors, I proceeded to interview two participants off-camera for research purposes. I didn’t take quotes and continued introducing myself as Matt Osborne.
I say all of this as prologue to explain that I’m working on a video involving Andy Breitbart; I was hoping to run into him, but was more concerned with getting video to lay out the narrative of astroturfery and right-wing nontroversy. If you follow my posts at HuffPo or my blog, you know that these are very big areas of interest for me; they’re subjects on which Maddow has reported as well.
So just in case I ran into Breitbart, I had decided to adopt the O’Keefe method: I went under pretext. The best part is, I did not lie about these things, and still got plenty of video. As far as professional ethics go, I think I did pretty well. My girlfriend thought it would be fun to try and say she was a high school senior working on a report for her government class; she does in fact appear quite young, but she’s no professional. Nevertheless, it’s her camera.
As I said, I got GREAT video that will be ready later today (I hope), but I didn’t get to meet or see Breitbart. So I was on my way out the same way I came in (the back door leads to the Opry Mills Mall parking lot; the facility has 24-7 public access) when I was stopped by a woman who claimed to be the event’s media liaison.
She had the a sharp, angry tone of a harpy. Mind you, this woman had already caught sight of us and the camera shortly after we came in and did nothing. When I now held out my hand and introduced myself as Matt Osborne, she asked me who I was with and I suddenly grew devil’s horns. Remember, I had already done what I’d come to do; just to find out what would happen, I said two words that may get me in real trouble:
“Huffington Post.”
I said that because (of course) Huffington Post is not a “real media organization” (while Breitbart, who borrowed the Huffington Post business model to spread demonstrable lies and paranoid racist agit-prop, was a central figure at the convention). Huffington Post alone does not get invited to the tea party. Wing Nut Daily is more “respectable.”
The harpy said I would have been treated like any other media organization if I had checked in with her, but I got VIDEO of their plan for me. No thanks — the media room was on the opposite end of the extremely large building, and reporters from other news agencies described an oppressive atmosphere.
Remember, I used public access. I took video of people already appearing on video. I didn’t tape or record interviews. As far as ethics are concerned, I’ll gladly compare mine to James O’Keefe any bloody day. Which must be why I grinned when the harpy said she should have expected as much, that HuffPo was an unprofessional outfit and I was the perfect example.
I tore a page out of the Breitbart-O’Keefe playbook and she called me “unprofessional.” Let that sink in.
Anyway: the harpy texted or tweeted someone. I did not have a press credential from HuffPo (I don’t think they have any, actually) so I began to explain that I am an unpaid blogger for Huffington Post…but she was already calling security as the words started coming out of my mouth.
The harpy said that I was to be detained and held for questioning, which was not about to happen for any number of reasons. It’s still the goddamn United States of America; I am not easily intimidated by civilians playing tinfoil god. I also found her highly offensive, so I just said “no” and turned to walk away.
Then the harpy followed me (she would follow me all the way to my car, she said). She attempted to taunt us (laughable) and hollered that we were in terrible trouble — which, in fact, we were; my girlfriend has breathing problems and was now having difficulty getting enough air.
When the harpy realized how I’d accessed the building, she took verbal offense that I had not paid $18 for self-parking. At that point I turned to her in an attempt at reconciliation; there were no grounds for arresting us, and my girlfriend was having a panic attack.
Which is the moment the harpy called the police. Irony: I was in a building full of people convinced the president was an illegitimate foreign agent bent on removing their constitutional rights.
We lost her and made a clean extraction, but there’s no video of all this — my girlfriend was so scared she thought she would drop the camera.
I will understand if Huffington Post is forced to disavow me. That’s fine; I’ll take whatever bad-boy punishment Arianna determines — and make no whimper of complaint under the lash. (Though it would be great to get some consideration from George Soros, who has yet to send me that check we’re all supposedly earning in the liberal ’sphere.) The fact is, I haven’t made any money by being on HuffPo and that’s not what I blog there for.
The woman called herself an employee of Gaylord’s, but I have yet to confirm that and have reason to doubt it. More as this develops…
ADDING: She actually yelled a verbal no-trespass order for the entire convention center and the Opry Mills mall at my back. Boo f***ing wa wa hoo, I can’t drive two hours to pay a retail markup.
ALSO ADDING: Did you know that shutting a door is “assault?” I didn’t, until the harpy shouted this fact too. Interesting how adaptable definitions become whenever wingnuts get involved.
Also also Adding: Gaylord (heh). Turns out the great Nashvegas institution is a corporate welfare recipient.
Manufacturing Nontroversy
Jan 29, 2010 ACORN, Breitbart, James O'Keefe, nontroversy
Everyone wants to know whether Andrew Breitbart was involved in “Whodatgate,” the attempted wiretapping of a Senator in a Federal building. I say this is not mysterious; of course Brietbart is involved. After all, he admits to paying O’Keefe a salary (or “life rights,” whatever those are); and James O’Keefe hasn’t produced any new content for Brietbart’s BigGovernment.com since November, when he posted the last of the ACORN videos.
Basically, O’Keefe needed a new scoop. For some reason, he got the bright idea to involve himself in a really stupid scheme to access the phone lines of a federal building — an act that has resulted in the 25-year old being ordered to live with his parents while awaiting trial. Perhaps that is the most fitting punishment he could have received, since he evidently hasn’t finished growing up.
And poor Andrew, who has basically spent his entire life riding on the work of others, was going broke without a big source of traffic. After all, Victoria Jackson will only get you so many page loads. He needed a big score — a Drudge link. Which brings us to the excuse the defendant’s lawyer gave the AP, which Breitbart then dutifully reported as “news:”
NEW ORLEANS (AP) – Four conservative activists accused of trying to tamper with a senator’s phones were just trying to record embarrassing undercover video of her staff ignoring phone calls from constituents angry that she supported health care reform, one of their attorneys said Thurday.
The four, including activist James O’Keefe, known for posing as a pimp and using a hidden camera to target the community-organizing group ACORN, were arrested Monday after targeting Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu’s office in a New Orleans federal building.
Attorney J. Garrison Jordan denied they were trying to disable or wiretap the phones in Landrieu’s office.
“You’re dealing with kids,” he said. “I don’t think they thought it through that far.”
Instead, Jordan said, they hoped to get embarrassing video footage of Landrieu’s staff handling constituent calls. Her office received complaints last month that callers opposed to her health care stance couldn’t get through.
Really? Callers couldn’t get through to a busy office in December, when everyone’s on Christmas vacation? Really? Scandal! Stop the presses! These lovable kids are heroes!
Just one question: why would they need to access the phone closet to do that, when you can just as easily hook up $20 worth of Radio Shack gear and record the phone calls from home?
Ponder that a minute, because it’s absolutely true. It’s also perfectly legal. Brietbart only made speculation worse with his epic breakdown on MSNBC yesterday:
Breitbart later posted an angry admission that he’d done no homework on Shuster prior to the interview. Unintentional hilarity is his forte:
So when MSNBC led the charge on Tuesday against James O’Keefe when he and three others were arrested in New Orleans at Senator Landrieu’s office, it came as no surprise that the cable network seized upon a narrative that presumed O’Keefe’s guilt, falsely extrapolated that he was being charged with felony wiretapping and instantaneously coined and repeated endlessly the new buzz phase, “Watergate Jr.”
It’s not Watergate junior, it’s Whodatgate. And oddly enough, Breitbart once hosted an entire series of dishonestly-edited and dubbed videos calculated to attack the reputation of a community service organization, then went on national television to suggest they contained evidence of criminal activity — and never once opined that Glenn Beck or Sean Hannity ought not to presume as they pleased.
Breitbart and O’Keefe were up to something, but it wasn’t journalism. They were out to make the news — to manufacture nontroversy. It bit them in the ass, and that is all.
Breaking: James O’Keefe Arrested for Attempted Wiretapping of a Senator
Jan 26, 2010 ACORN, James O'Keefe
The New Orleans Times-Picayune reports that James O’Keefe, the “filmmaker” responsible for the ACORN “sting” videos, was arrested by Federal Marshals yesterday after attempting to tap phones in Sen. Mary Landrieu’s office — inside a federal building. Federal codes are remarkably clear on this sort of thing: O’Keefe faces jail time, and not happy look-at-me jail time but hard time in a real, Louisiana butt-banging prison. No word thus far on whether Andrew Breitbart was stupid enough to involve himself in this scheme.
Will update as more comes in… For now, I’m just curious how O’Keefe thought he could get away with this scheme, and whether he’s got a secret hard-on for G. Gordon Liddy.
UPDATE: Breitbart denies involvement. Pat Buchanan (of Nixon vintage) doesn’t understand the fuss. Media Matters reminds us that 31 Republican House members wanted to praise O’Keefe with a resolution.
UPDATE: Unsurprisingly, Faux Noise tried to put the best face on it:
UPDATE: You can read the government’s affidavit here (PDF).
