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Holy crap
1/50th of the country realizes that the government gets more money to pay for things by raising taxes.
The controversial interpretation of O'Keefe's masterpieces
Golly, I wonder if a paranid whackjob breaking the law (a second time) might be a cautionary tale to the media to not squeal with glee over a rich white kid heavily doctoring video meant to wreck an organization that helps poor black people because they think it's amazing journalism.
To answer Marshall's (possibly rhetorical) question, though, here's what they were thinking: that they could get away with it. It's really that simple, no more, no less. O'Keefe already broke the law once and got away with it. He is being sued for his ACORN stunt by multiple people. It is illegal to do what he did, but he got away with it, partially because he attacked an incompetently-run organization that was incompetently run by black people trying to help black people, and partially because the outcry over what he doctored a video to "uncover" in the minds of a largely-racist and largely anti-Democrat noise machine overwhelmed that fact.
Our nation has a history of paranoid whackjobs, separated into two distinct columns of praise and ridicule solely by success. Linda Tripp got away with it. Nixon would have gotten away with it if his insane crimes actually revealed overwhelming dirt. And if a guy tackled Obama at a campaign event claiming that the president was secretly one of the aliens from "They Live" and it turned out it was true, no one would care about his crime either. Crimes of the paranoid are simply a gamble. They pay off if you are right. They usually don't, because they're insane.
The most startling bit of this, however, is how O'Keefe horrifically is defending himself as a "journalist." Of all his actions, that's truly the one that needs to be fought most vocally and viciously because it's the one that sets the most dangerous precedent, and of all his actions I actually find the most irrational. Breaking the law, doctoring footage, tampering with sources, and manipulating your story for a preconceived conclusion are all examples of not being a journalist, or at the very least, a bad one.
I don't know why this is so hard to interpret. O'Keefe is rich, white, Republican, and as Oliver North and G. Gordon Liddy prove, trying to do something crazy and illegal is not much of a risk in the long run when you have that going for you.
"Anything"
The people blindly supporting the existence of Obama as president ignore the inverse meaning of why nothing is "his fault." I am not looking forward to his 2012 campaign being one of blaming everyone else for why he hasn't done a damn thing.
True believers can enjoy an article from the Washington Post that ran this same week, revealing that the incoming Obama administration's grand strategy for running the country was going to be, quite literally, hope. By that I meant they hoped that everyone just went along with their ideas. The Democrats and their largest majority in a generation were defeated by the unprecedented action of Republicans opposing them. Please try not to cry.
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Chuck Asay, the best cartoonist of the 19th century
Hey Chuck, I think my favorite part of the "what we have now" panel is the woman and the black guy.