O’Keefe Stung by His Own Sting; Even RedState Dissed Him

Yesterday WaPo published a story about an attempted Project Veritas sting of WaPo. In case you missed it, James O’Keefe sent a woman to tell Washington Post reporters that she had been impregnated by Roy Moore way back when. But the reporters checked out her background and story, and instead published a story about confronting the woman about her lies and exposing Project Veritas.

Jonathan Chait commented:

The scam collapsed for a number of reasons. His fake source provided a flimsy cover story with odd details — she claimed to have only spent a few summers in Alabama, but provided a cell phone with an Alabama area code. The supposed place of employment that she provided did not have any person by that name working there. A search of her name turned up a social-media post in which she explained that she was going to “work in the conservative media movement to combat the lies and deceipt [sic] of the liberal MSM.”

If you’ve ever watched a spy movie, you’ll probably recall that the spies never get caught because they left a social-media post under their real name declaring “I’m enrolling in espionage school to become a spy!”

Instead of owning up to having been caught, O’Keefe put up a highly edited video on his Project Veritas site (to which I will not link) that purports to show WaPo reporter Aaron C. Davis admitting to O’Keefe that, among other things, the paper publishes negative opinions of Trump. However, WaPo had filmed the entire encounter also and published the unedited version, which clarified that Davis was talking about the editorial section.

This last bit of derp was so clumsy that even RedState called it out as a “a desperate attempt at damage control.”  Jim Geraghty at National Review Online published a takedown of O’Keefe that could have run word-for-word at Alternet. Scott Johnson of the Power Tools referred to this episode as “O’Keefe’s exploding cigar.” And Red Dreher at The American Conservative practically begged people to stop funding O’Keefe. This last bit inspired the following comment:

We need a better class of rube in the US. Even the dumbest grifters make out OK these days–O’Keefe gets more than $300K a year to walk around stepping on rakes.

True enough. But this same commenter also said that O’Keefe wouldn’t be going away, because their class of rubes still believes him. And, sure enough, the flaming idiots at Gateway Pundit (to which I do not link) are celebrating O’Keefe’s great success. But the best Brietbart can do is claim that O’Keefe and WaPo busted each other. And I understand Drudge isn’t touching it, one way or another.

So O’Keefe will be around for awhile to step on more rakes. However, it’s possible that he’ll disappear from mainstream media. The days when his easily debunked claims are uncritically picked up by any but extreme right-wing media outlets are over, I believe.

See also Charles Pierce.