Press Badge and Clown Shoes

I suppose it would be a stretch to blame James O'Keefe and his merry band entirely on Michael Moore. Josh Marshall's Taking Points Memo has done stellar work on the story of how the 25-year-old O'Keefe and his co-horts--Stan Dai, Joseph Basel, Stan Dai, and Robert Flanagan, the 24-year-old son of William Flanagan, the acting U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Louisiana-- all came to be arrested as part of a scheme to mess with the phones in Senator Mary Landrieu's office in the Hale Boggs Federal Building in New Orleans, while disguised as the Three Stooges diguised as electricians. TPM noted that these fellows formed their styles in the culture of conservative campus opinion journalism and humor magazines; as The Dartmouth Review proved back in the Reagan era, there's something about the combination of a campus environment and a budding conservative mindset that yields the kind of comedy one used to only be able to get from Hustler magazine. But I can't help but suspect that right-wing mischief makers often start out with the idea that they'd like to co-opt the kind of fun being had on the left, or in the center, ro just by non-partisan sane people. (How many knock-offs of The Daily Show has Fox News attempted now?) Given their extreme youth, the members of the O'Keefe gang have grown up in the shadow of Michael Moore, and they've learned the key lessons of his style: that projecting the right attitude, while making yourself the on-camera star of your own work, will inspire people to embrace you as the last honest, sane truth teller around; that people get less excited by serious, sustained investigative journalism than by seeing their beloved truth teller making some poor sap look venal or ridiculous; that working people who have to be where you show up with your camera crew, because it's their job, are fish in a barrel.

Moore found out that, by making life hell for security guards and lobby receptionists, he could persuade his audience that The Man was deathly afeared of him and had surrounded himself with tacky Nazi zombies to keep him from storming the executive suites in his laundry day finery. O'Keefe first attracted attention last year when, taking off from specious propaganda-news reports that the nationwide community organization group ACORN was some kind of Marxist vote-stuffing operation with close underground ties to then-candidate Barack Obama, he executed a media stunt that firmly established that some of the group's employees, if accosted on a slow day, would choose to be entirely too indulgent of a geeky retard dressed like Doctor Detroit when he barges in demanding that he be shown a route to financial assistance for his stable of 'hos. By giving right wingers a chance to howl that ACORN is a boondoggle for comic strip pimps, O'Keefe's videos completely sidestepped the complaints that had been made about he organization while dropping a heavy hint about why it was that so many angry white folks were sure that there must be something hinky about a place devoted to helping poor families, many of them black, and encouraging them to vote.

O'Keefe's Candid Camera antics got him slurped over to such a degree that he must have been dying to get to his next round of attention. The best clue to where his head is at, and how callow he and his playmates are, comes not from their Halloween antics but from the reported detail that they actually used a cell phone to film themselves committing a felony in Landrieu's office. Since their arrest--O'Keefe has, quite properly, now been sent back to New Jersey where his mommy and daddy can keep an eye on him--their defenders have insisted that the little fellas never meant to commit a crime, which, given that it would be unduly insulting to imagine that they never suspected that assuming false identities to enter a federal building to interfere with someone's phone system isn't illegal, can only mean that they expect people to understand that they didn't think the law applied to them and to regard this attitude with a great deal of sympathy. O'Keefe probably thinks that once you've been anointed as a star by Fox News and Chris Wallace has bestowed upon you the thanks of a grateful nation, you've been given permission to do whatever thou wilst, like Elvis after President Nixon had given him his very own super-secret civilian narc force badge and decoder ring.

I can't help but feel a special affection for this story, being myself a transplanted son of the Pelican State. And the fact that James, Zeppo, and the rest of the boys targeted Landrieu ought to be instructional for all of us as we struggle to navigate our way in this divided country. In the past few months, I've grown accustomed to seeing ol' Mary--the daughter of the much-loved late New Orleans Mayor Moon Landrieu and sister of Mitch, who aims to be the city's next mayor--mentioned more and more often, alongside people like Joe Lieberman, as among the most hated enemies of progress by various leftish bloggers. I can understand their disdain for the woman who Wikipedia labels "among the most conservative Democrats in the U.S. Senate", but I wonder how many of them even know that right-wingers, especially those in Louisiana, still think of her as a cross between Rosa Luxemburg and Hanoi Jane, all rolled together, with your mom's haircut. From the time she was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 1996 to her last fight for re-election, she has been the beneficiary of votes from Louisiana liberals who are too terrified of the fire-breathing loonies who have invariably dogged her heels to the finish line to worry too much about her own ideological deficiencies. The Fox Pimp Squad seems to have zeroed in on her as a villain worthy of a takedown on the basis of complaints made this past summer by teabagging chuckleheads who organized a campaign to phone Landrieu's office en masse to wail about the evils who health care, then, so great is their mastery of the physics of which way is up, proceeded to shriek that there must be a conspiracy to deliberately ignore their voices because, what with all those idiots jamming the phone lines, it became very difficult to get through. One of the various accounts given so far as to what the A-Team thought they were doing has it that they sought to address the matter of Landrieu's staff ignoring tea baggers' phone calls by disabling the phones, which sure would've learned 'em.

The least amusing, and most ominous part of all this, is the light it sheds on the Pelican Institute, a conservative-libertarian think tank that was founded last year by Kevin Kane. The group, which released its own investigative report attacking ACORN last year, employed Flanagan "to assist with its blog... O'Keefe gave a speech at a Jan. 21 Pelican Institute public luncheon focused on investigative reporting and the use of new media." The Institute's website features links to writing that makes fun of Brad Pitt's organization for building funny-looking houses and quotes residents who need prodding to remember that, oh yeah, now that you mention it there was a hurricane there a few years ago! The general tone is highly reminiscent of those papers written in the 1960s by conservative sociologists who had a special knack for interviewing colored folks who were baffled and upset that outside agitators kept coming down and stirring up bad feelings when the lives they lived were already so sweet, what with having their very own water fountains and all. It also recalls that brief window in the history of post-Saddam Iraq when neoconservatives talked about using the country as a lab in which to build a Utopian paradise, with supply-side economics and flat taxes as far as the eye could see. Does New Orleans really need this shit? Surely Kevin Kane and James O'Keefe have lives closer to home they could be fucking up with their asshole personalities, crackpot theories, and questionable dress sense.