Time to blow this boat out of the water

Aw, poor James O’Keefe. Apparently he’s so desperate to get laid, he has to resort to now…

Recently, I was the target of a failed punk. James O’Keefe, the so-called “pimp” in the ACORN expose videos, was participating in a detailed plan to “faux” seduce me on his boat. For months, I had been working on a documentary about the young conservative movement. James had called me about concerns he had regarding an upcoming shoot. He asked me to meet him to talk about the shoot. I agreed to fly to Maryland and then drive to his “office” for a face-to-face conversation with him.

When I showed up, there was no office, as promised. Instead, he wanted to get me on a boat, which we later learned, was staged as a “pleasure palace.” One of his colleagues, Izzy Santa, who was in Maryland that day, told me about the plan and stopped the punk before it happened.

Izzy told me he had “strawberries and champagne” waiting for me on the boat, and that he planned to “hit on me” the entire time. She said it would all be captured on hidden cameras that had been set up on the boat and in the back yard. She said the sole purpose of the “punk” was to embarrass me, and to make CNN look bad.

And in the end, what it did was make HIM look bad. Check out his props list:

1. condom jar

2. dildos

3. Music

a. Alicia keys

b. 80s romance songs, things that are typically James

c. avoid Marvin Gaye as too cliche

4. lube

5. ceiling mirror

6. posters and paintings of naked women

7. playboys and pornographic magazines

8. candles

9. Viagra and stamina pills

10. fuzzy handcuffs

11. blindfold

WTF are “80s romance songs, things that are typically James”? I want to know, so I can avoid those (and any guy who tries to play them for me with obvious ulterior motives).

And about the only un-icky thing on the list seems to be the candles. But even those can get icky in the hands of a right-wing slimeball famous for playing the pimp, no? I mean, who knows what he planned to use them for besides illumination…

Okay. Whenever you’re done scrubbing that awful imagery from your mind’s eye, read on.

This is, as Media Matters informs us, someone that both the WaHoPo’s ombud and the NY Whore Times wanted to see taken more seriously, as “balance” to the “liberal media” viewpoint.

Um, what?

Why does honest reporting, which CNN’s Abbie Boudreau was trying to do before this asinine “punking”, have to be “balanced” with lies and bullshit and cheap, ugly sleazeball stunts? If reality apparently has a “liberal bias”, that’s just too fucking bad. When did it become the major media’s job to blow sugar up Wingnuttia’s ass, instead of simply reporting the news?

Actually, liberals and leftists are biased only in favor of reality, and as the fakery-driven world of O’Keefe & Co. demonstrates, the right is certainly not. But when it gets so bad that even über-rightardly bullshit-monger Brent Bozell calls you out, you know it’s gone through the Looking Glass.

There can be no illusion of “balance” here, and maybe that’s just as well; it’s good to finally get out into the open just what the right-wing media are about. They are not about “balancing” an excessively liberal media viewpoint, because that has never existed. They’re about crafting a false utopian narrative and selling it ad nauseam; something poised between the gilded age of 1850s robber-baron capitalism and a future straight out of The Handmaid’s Tale, dressed up in a Father Knows Best sweater-vest, with a hefty dollop of Ayn Rand caveman clubtocracy thrown in for good mismeasure. Something we’re supposed to be fooled into aspiring to. Something to seduce and beguile us with its glitz and glamour.

Only, of course, it doesn’t work out that way.

The reality is a creepy little shit-weasel, squatting on a boat (whose?), surrounded by his sleazy props, dreaming of putting the moves (learned, no doubt, from the ultra-sleazy pickup-artist “movement”) to the bewildered reporter. Whom he fancies to be a “bubbleheaded bleach blonde”, in the words of Don Henley.

But the self-admitted bottle blonde isn’t that dumb; she picks up on the fact that his “assistant” is upset about the transparent date rape scenario (complete with handcuffs and drugs) that’s being planned. And gets her to tell what’s really going on. And then THAT becomes the story, which for obvious reasons will get left out of the larger documentary that Abbie Boudreau was preparing on the young conservative movement.

Actually, this shouldn’t be left out; it should, in fact, BE the story. There are plenty of young conservative “citizen journalists” who’ve built their hot-shot reputations entirely on lies, sleaze and “gotcha” tactics of the lowest order (Lila Rose, anyone?) The conservative media noise machine, young and not-so, is all about this sort of thing. The glittering “utopian” vision they offer is out of reach and far removed from reality. It would never float; like O’Keefe’s boat, it would never get away from the dock. They know it. So to bolster their lagging credibility, they resort to smearing the mainstream media, which is far from liberal, as their enemy.

And, stupidly, the mainstream media falls right into the trap of Taking Them Seriously, and rushes to give them all kinds of airtime and space they don’t really deserve. Which is a great way to undermine their own credibility, and thus do the right-wing noise machine’s job for it. Who can take the mainstream media seriously when they uncritically fold under the withering scorn from a bunch of astroturfers and blowhards? Where is the media’s collective spine?

Abbie Boudreau isn’t the only one who got “punked” by the young conservative movement. Everyone in the media who gives them credence is being played for a sucker. Surely I can’t be the only person who wants to see the media expose these people, all of them, for the fraudsters they are. Instead of an “objective” report on what the “movement” only purports to be about, how about a real investigative hard-hitter that shreds their press releases and makes clear what a swindle they’ve perpetrated all over the globe? The global financial meltdown, among other things, is directly attributable to right-wing media pumping and shilling, as well as mainstream “reporting” that lacks critical discernment. If we don’t want to see it get worse, it’s time to bring back good old investigative reporting–and turn it on the liars with a vengeance.

It’s time to torpedo the entire phony love boat, where crapitalism seduces media and media falls for it every time, right the hell out of the water. Otherwise, we are the ones who will end up being sunk.

PS: The fun has just begun. If you’re on the tweeter, follow Don Juan O’Keefe!

PPS: And on a more serious note, The Root delves into how a black man would never get away with a “stunt” like this one.

PPPS, Thursday the 30th, ca. 10:30 am: Eric Boehlert at Media Matters echoes my sentiments (expressed above) with uncanny exactness. Meanwhile, at AlterNet, Julie Millican points out that the right-wing noise machine has a long-standing problem with women, while the Brad Blog takes on O’Keefe’s by-now arm-long rap sheet.