Sunday, March 7, 2010

The Left and Its Cheap ‘Racism’ Charge — the Last Refuge of Scoundrels and ‘Media Matters’

Larry  O'ConnorPosted by Larry O'Connor Mar 7th 2010 at 2:15 pm in Media Matters, Racism 

James O’Keefe has to be destroyed in some way.  And the best way you can attack an effective conservative in America today is to call him a racist.  In the past year the tactic has been used against Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Andrew Breitbart, Bill O’Reilly, Scott Brown, the entire Tea Party movement and, all those who oppose President Obama’s health care scheme (the last charge was leveled by none other than a former President).
So, I suppose James O’Keefe should have expected this attack, but it doesn’t make it any easier to take.  Thanks to a deceitful and malicious agenda from the likes of Max Blumenthal, Salon.com and the George Soros funded-John Podesta created-Media Matters for America, the myth of James O’Keefe as a racist has been put forth on the internet and linked to and repeated over and over without any real regard for the truth or normative human decency.  His name and reputation have been raped.   And like all of those men watching Jodie Foster get assaulted in the film The Accused, the establishment media have sat back and watched.  They are as guilty of the rape for not doing anything to stop it.
O’Keefe is the young man who along with Hannah Giles created a sensation last summer with his undercover investigative series exposing a disturbing lack of concern at various ACORN offices over the suggestion of prostitution and sex slavery.  ACORN and their enablers/apologists in the media have made several attempts to rationalize and minimize the images and words we all heard on O’Keefe’s videos.
At first, the behavior of the ACORN employees was written off as isolated to a small handful of offices and merely a couple of low-level employees.  Then the angle was that James and Hannah had broken state laws to acquire their reports, so therefore the content should be ignored.  Then they even attempted to claim that nothing was wrong because James and Hannah were lying about their prostitution business, so no actual laws were broken.  Now, the latest distraction is that the videos are too heavily edited to be relied upon and James only wore that ridiculous pimp costume in the title sequences, not in the offices, so the whole story is misleading.
Of course, all of these half-arsed attempts to explain away the laissez-faire attitudes of the ACORN employees neglect to persuade because, much to the chagrin of ACORN and their left-wing defenders, the American people are not nearly as stupid as the left would like them to be.  We have seen the videos, we have read the full transcripts and listened to the full audios, which have been available at Big Government from the moment each new city in the ACORN investigation was released.  And we know what we see, we know what we read and we know what we hear.  We see a disturbing nonchalance from employee after employee hearing all about prostitution and sexual exploitation of minors, and instead of turning James and Hannah over to the police, they go out of their way to help them carry out their schemes.
So, as per Alinsky’s famous Rule No. 13, the only way to stop O’Keefe is to paint him with the most shameful and  disgraceful label one can have in our society:  racist.  One of the examples they use to prove O’Keefe’s “pattern of disturbing racial issues” is an undercover investigative mission he undertook years ago with Pro-Life activist Lila Rose.
The plan was pretty straightforward, and if I was comfortable with my first-grader knowing the details of the plot, I would tell him about it and I’m sure he would realize in an instant who the racists are in the scheme.  But, apparently the geniuses at MMFA, salon.com, ACORN and most other left-wing establishment entities can’t rise to the level of my first-grader.  They have manufactured the slanderous lie of racism and leveled it against O’Keefe for this ingenious investigation:
For someone to look at this scenario and assign racism to the person pretending to be racist for the sole purpose of exposing the racism at Planned Parenthood rather than the “helpful” Planned Parenthood employee, they need to be either ignorant or nefariously disingenuous.  Either way, Blumenthal, Salon.com and MMFA seem to be comfortable in either category because they continue to do it without the slightest bit of shame.
But recently validation for James O’Keefe came in the most unlikely of places, the front page of the New York Times.  In its article on the growing pro-life movement within the African American community, the Times describes the investigation conducted by Rose and O’Keefe:
Planned Parenthood has apologized for the employees’ statements and says they do not reflect the organization’s values or policies.  The recordings led to calls by black leaders to withdraw financing of Planned Parenthood, which receives about $350 million a year in government money for education and medical services. They reinvigorated old claims that the organization was a front for racial genocide and that (Planned Parenthood founder Margaret) Sanger viewed blacks as undesirable.  Scholars acknowledge that Sanger did ally herself with eugenics, at the time a mainstream movement, but said she believed that birth control, sterilization and abortion should be voluntary and not based on race.
In this thorough article about abortion and the black community, the Times had every opportunity to reinforce the storyline painting O’Keefe as racist in this episode, instead they use his expose as an example of the racial problems at Planned Parenthood that go all the way back to its founder, Margaret Sanger.
Let’s look at the immediate fallout from O’Keefe’s actions.  At the time the story broke, the black community was not outraged at O’Keefe for his story; they were outraged at Planned Parenthood.  Black leaders called for the withdrawal of financial backing.  Planned Parenthood had to go into damage control.  It is only now, years later, when they need a story to fit their narrative, do the white men and women at salon.com and MMFA use this story as an example of O’Keefe’s racism.
If O’Keefe isn’t a racist, then a far more damaging truth will be revealed about the institutional racism within the Great Society’s sacred cows.  If O’Keefe is not a racist for his calls to Planned Parenthood, then Planned Parenthood must be the racist organization O’Keefe exposed.  If O’Keefe is not a racist, then ACORN must be racist, as they treat minorities as pawns in an imprisoning system of social services that are really meant to enable African-Americans to meagerly survive within the constraints of poverty, forever burdened with the humiliating dependence on politicians and community organizers eager to keep them needy rather than to inspire them to achieve and leave their poverty behind.
The truth does not matter when such large stakes are at hand.  So, they rape his name.  They call him a racist and they invent stories to prove their charge.  Now the question is:  how long will it be allowed to go on?

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