To many rightwing Americans, fresh-faced political activist James O'Keefe is a hero. He is the conservative version of Michael Moore: an earnest prankster whose intrepid journalism exposes the liberal left for the anti-American force it really is.
After all, O'Keefe, 26, is the man who brought down the conservative bete noir Acorn – an organisation that advocated for low-income Americans and tried to get them to vote – by posing as a pimp with a prostitute and filming Acorn staff as he solicited them for advice on how to avoid taxes.
That "victory", which helped destroy Acorn, sealed O'Keefe's place in the pantheon of conservative heroes. Never mind that investigations in California and New York found no evidence of Acorn wrongdoing in the evidence that emerged from his stunt, and that O'Keefe's videos were, in fact, selectively edited and misleadingly used. Yet, O'Keefe was praised across the board by rightwing figures like Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Andrew Breitbart (who, as the Shirley Sherrod episode showed, knows a thing or two about misleadingly edited videos).
O'Keefe's reputation was so high that it even survived him being arrested for a stunt involving conservative activists posing as telephone repairmen and trying to get into Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu's office in New Orleans. O'Keefe pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor; but, again, conservatives brushed it off as the price to be paid for youthful enthusiasm in a good anti-liberal cause.
more:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/sep/29/james-okeefe-cnn
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