Tells confused listeners: 'I have to apologize to the nation'
Goes on to spend weekend lashing out at Vast Leftwing Conspiracy in various paranoid rants, as NYTimes still supports his hoax...
By Brad Friedman on 2/21/2010, 4:13pm PT  

Just a quick reminder that none of The BRAD BLOG's recent series of detailed reporting on the MSM's failure to properly report on the ACORN "pimp" video hoaxes is actually about Andrew Breitbart, in truth. He'd love it to be. But it's not. He's just one overly-influential cancer cell in the quickly metastasizing illness over-taking the mainstream media. That illness is best illustrated, of late, by the willingness of the once-credible New York Times (and many others) to treat Andy --- as well as his band of GOP propaganda mongers and dirty tricksters --- as a respectable source, rather than the confirmed liar, desperate flip-flopper, self-defining hypocrite, and Republican con-man that he is.

But since the "Liberal MSM" are not yet ready to cop to their egregious and repeated errors on that front, and since we're feeling generous today for some reason, we'll just take Andy at his tweeted word from last week when he sputtered: "@TheBradBlog U do understand that if I were least bit worried about your line of questioning Id ignore U, right? Do U not get that?"

Yeah, we get that. Which must be why, during his series of insane, paranoid, meltdown rants (see videos below) at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in D.C. all weekend long, where he fingered an imaginary Vast Leftwing Conspiracy at the heart of his epic fail, he forgot to mention The BRAD BLOG for some reason!

It's as if he were entirely "ignoring" our "line of questioning" for some reason.

That, even as he was forced to admit at the very top of his Saturday morning speech at CPAC --- undoubtedly due to having finally been sold out by his own fake "prostitute," Hannah Giles, the day before --- that he did, "apparently," lie about his phony ACORN "pimp" story...

At the very top of his few short moments at the podium, after being introduced by Giles as "my boss," Andy said (audio here):

Wow. What a six month's it's been! I want to start off with a... I have to apologize to the nation because, uh, the pimp in the pimp and prostitute video apparently wasn't dressed like a flamboyant pimp. I am so sorry this nation --- uh, for --- I don't know what to say. It, apparently it doesn't matter anymore. Look mainstream media, we are now six months into this ACORN thing and you just lost in New Jersey and Massachusetts and Virginia and we have video cameras on you every where you go, SEIU and ACORN...

Following his admission made to dead silence, he moved very quickly to his imaginary world controlled by "SEIU and ACORN," as I suspect the CPAC crowd was left scratching their heads at his remarks about the "pimp" not being dressed as a pimp since he has, for six months, being lying to them about that. He even published the lie in his own Washington Timescolumn, when he falsely claimed the highly-doctored, heavily-overdubbed, secretly-taped ACORN hit videos showed his employees James O'Keefe and Giles "going to the Baltimore offices of ACORN ... dressed as a pimp and a prostitute and asking for - and getting - help for various illegal activities."

All of that after Giles ratted poor Andy out, just after he tweet-lied to us earlier last week that he'd "told truth every step of way." It didn't stop Andy, the Orly Taitz of the rightwing "journalist" thug and hoaxster junta from finding all new sharks to jump and from blaming his own failures on his "liberal media" conspiracy theories.

Breitbart spent much of his CPAC weekend snarling and performing for the cameras and adoring, unquestioning wingnuts in an embarrassing array of spitting tirades against the world. Yet, in all of them posted so far, he avoided noting that The BRAD BLOG was the one that had originally helped to re-highlight again recently, the fact that his so-called "Liberal MSM" grossly misreported and misrepresented the ACORN "pimp" hoax.

So it was when Andy, after being hoisted on his own fake "prostitute" petard Friday, went on his tear on Saturday, the day after David Weigel of the Washington Independent got the scoop from Giles, who played the "prostitute" in those videos, confirming that both Breitbart and O'Keefe were lying all along about the ACORN "pimp" story in order to sell it.

Weigel then interviewed Breitbart on Saturday at CPAC, capturing the following insane rant:

In a short conversation after his speech — which was taped by a film crew that was hovering around us — Andrew Breitbart chided me for asking Giles about the “no outrageous costumes” attack, saying that it was a “distraction” thrown up by the Center for American Progress and Media Matters and pointing out that when blogger Mike Stark first asked O’Keefe about the costumes, he happily explained that the pimp costume wasn’t worn inside of ACORN’s offices. If George Soros, John Podesta of the Center for American Progress, and Eric Boehlert of Media Matters wanted to watch the unedited tapes, said Breitbart, he was ready. He’d be challenging them to do so for months.

“This is a concerted effort, politics of personal destruction,” said Breitbart. He leaned down toward my notebook as I wrote down quotes. “Fuck you, John Podesta. What’s in your closet, John Podesta? Big Podesta? Big Soros? Do you want us to play these games? Because we’re playing to win.”

While Boehlert, as named above, has done some terrific work on this story, breaking, among other things, Breitbart's Washington Times column lie, I don't think that Center for American Progress has covered it at all. At least not since The BRAD BLOG began pointing out the "pimp" hoax recently, following O'Keefe's federal felony arrest in Louisiana with three others for attempting to manipulate the phone system of a Democratic U.S. Senator, and his preposterous explanation for it.

And wingnut Breitbart's Soros conspiracy delusions? Whatever. Point here is that Breitbart still refuses to release O'Keefe's unedited videos on the Internet, despite his willingness to release the phony, doctored-up ones that way. And now, as he was last week with me on the radio, playing a game about George Soros and John Podesta showing up at a Breitbart's Fantasy Travelling Circus to watch them all publicly.

There is, of course, a reason Breitbart won't simply release his so-terribly-damning videos in which, even in the doctored versions, there appears to be no evidence of illegalities by the hoaxed ACORN workers according to reports from the Congressional Research Service as well as from former MA Attorney General Scott Harshbarager [PDF].

In truth, O'Keefe, Breitbart's employee and accused federal felon, never dressed as the outlandish 70's blaxpoitation pimp as the New York Times and many others have repeatedly misreported. In fact, was conservatively dressed in slacks and button-down shirt, and represented himself to the low-level ACORN workers and volunteers as an aspiring politician still in law school, hoping to help his "girlfriend" Giles by rescuing her from the house of an abusive pimp who was stalking and had tried to kill her.

None of the workers they spoke with who had tried to help them had advised "evading taxes" as the wingnut crew would have you believe, and there was no "ACORN Child Prostitution Ring" as both Breitbart and O'Keefe have happily misrepresented (lied about) time and again.

You'd only know all of that, of course, from reading their released text transcripts, which, unlike the doctored tapes, were not shown on Fox "News," since the highly-doctored, heavily-overdubbed, secretly-taped videos offered a completely different impression, including the faked TV-friendly notion that O'Keefe was wearing his pimp get-up in those offices, just as Breitbart and O'Keefe had lied about in the media.

Where we now know about those lies, we don't know about others, since Breitbart and O'Keefe still refuse to release the unedited video tapes for some odd reason.

Incredibly, with all of that, the New York Times still refuses to issue corrections for their stories which helped result in Congressional action, outrageously attempting to withdraw millions (not "billions" as O'Keefe lied many times), from ACORN. (Similarly, outlets that also misreported the story, such as Baltimore Sun, CNN, New York Post, Washington City Paper, Philadelphia Daily News, NPR, and Dallas Morning News have also failed to issue corrections.)

But Andy was melting down all week. In addition to his "Fuck you!" to Podesta, he also described Media Matters' Senior Fellow Boehlert as "depraved," adding about him, "What a sickening variant on the human form. His mother must throw up thinking of him."

He called Salon's Max Blumenthal "the most despicable life form I've ever seen."

He told Mediaite's Tommy Christopher to "put your dick back in your drawers."

And while receiving an award (amusingly enough) "for investigative reporting on ACORN" on Thursday from his fellow delusional rightwing loons at the absurdly named "Accuracy in Media," Breitbart went off on a bender against New York Times reporter Kate Zernike, calling her "despicable...a despicable human being."

Nonetheless, incredibly, Zernike's Times continues to write fawning stories about the pathological liar Breitbart, and refuses to correct their own record where, in story after story, they were utterly scammed by him.

As promised previously, more soon on NYTimes Public Editor Clark Hoyt's responses to The BRAD BLOG's call for retractions, apologies, investigations, and explanations for the Times failures, and his extraordinary reasons for still declining to recommend all of the above to the "paper of record."

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Here are just a few of Breitbart's embarrassing video-taped confrontations at CPAC. Joan Walsh at Salon has a few more of what she describes as some of the "greatest hits of snarling Breitbart's Saturday meltdown"...

"Why don't you care about ACORN? Why do you care about the nuances? Are you insane?":


"Are you accusing me of being a racist? Will somebody get this guy out of here? You punk!":


"I have to apologize to the nation because the pimp...wasn't dressed like a flamboyant pimp":


And Mediaite has another fun one here...

UPDATE 2/23/10: "Exclusive: NYTimes Public Editor Declines to Recommend Retraction for Multiple Erroneous Reports on False ACORN 'Pimp' Story" Full story, Hoyt's emails...

UPDATE 2/24/10: Hoyt responds to our on his emails and accuses The BRAD BLOG of having a "political agenda" on par with O'Keefe and Breitbart. Also, blogosphere issues blistering response, petition, call for Hoyt to step down. Full details, Hoyt's email response, right here...

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