As a filmmaker I have always entrusted the lens of a camera to illuminate both the stuff of my imagination and that of this world that otherwise would not be visible. This summer, I was tasked by Move America Forward – the largest pro-troop 501(c)3 in the country, which hosted the recent Troopathon that raised $541,711 for care packages for the troops – to travel to Iraq and capture a glimpse of the situation that may have ended up on the cutting room floors of the mainstream media.

My traveling companions were Matt Sanchez, a Move America Forward volunteer and producer of Fox News’ The Strategy Room; Mary Pearson, photographer; and Debbie Lee, the founder of America’s Mighty Warriors, a Gold Star mom whose son, Marc Allen Lee, was the first Navy-SEAL killed in Iraq during a fight in Ramadi on August 2, 2006.

In his last letter home, Marc had written:

What I do over here is only a small percent of what keeps our country great. I think the truth to our greatness is each other. Purity, morals and kindness, passed down to each generation through example. So to all my family and friends, do me a favor and pass on the kindness, the love, the precious gift of human life to each other so that when your children come into contact with a great conflict that we are now faced with here in Iraq, that they are people of humanity, of pure motives, of compassion.

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Jersey City pimp Allen E. Brown was recently sentenced to 18 years in federal prison for trafficking underaged prostitutes. Perhaps he would have gotten off had he simply claimed in court that he wasn’t dressed as a pimp when operating his prostitution ring.

For the past nine months, Media Matters for America has obsessively defended ACORN’s video-verified role in helping James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles set up a brothel for pubsescent sex slaves on the basis that James was not dressed as a pimp and that Hannah was not dressed as a prostitute — as she was in my creative b-roll portion of the videos — when entering the offices.

Despite the audio-recorded conversations in which Hannah was indisputably introduced as a prostitute requesting ACORN’s assistance in establishing a brothel, in which almost all ACORN workers approached offered their assistance — in Media Matters’ eyes, the wardrobe factor automatically rendered the damning investigation a “practical joke” and a “hoax.”

But while they laughed at the apparently trivial reality of a taxpayer-funded organization enabling underaged sex slavery, when O’Keefe set up in New Orleans what was actually intended as a practical joke to be taped and put up on YouTube as a minor radar-blip project to punctuate his more serious investigations — the left was not laughing. (more…)

On March 5, in a kicking-and-screaming, last-ditch effort to save her organization, ACORN CEO Bertha Lewis wrote in BeyondChron.org of the “right-wing attacks” on ACORN by “undercover right-wing racist James O’Keefe,” repeating a Greatest Hits compilation of factually-defunct angles left has desperately drummed into the mainstream for the past five months, from the race angle to the doctored-videos angle.

On March 4, Stephen Colbert staked these angles to the pop culture turf in light of the Brooklyn District Attorney’s recent report that the undercover tapes were “heavily edited,” producing a satirically-edited interview with Sean Hannity to deride James’ allged “deceptive editing.”  No mention that Charles Hynes, the Brooklyn DA, was endorsed by the ACORN-related Working Families Party during his recent bid for re-election. (Find the unedited audio and full transcripts here.)

And my recent bar brawl with Tommy Christopher — a Mediaite blogger who has been promoting the notion that James O’Keefe’s ACORN investigation was racially motivated — in Washington D.C. during CPAC, confirms my assessment of the utter desperation of O’Keefe’s critics.

Ironically, with no tangible evidence that O’Keefe’s videos were, in fact, “heavily edited,” the left has been literally heavily editing their attack plan against him – correcting, updating, and revising their angles of assault in order to catch up with the facts. (more…)

In their February 9 column on BustedHalo.com, “Tricks Are For Kids,”  conservative Catholic writers Dawn Eden and William Doino, Jr. joined the herd of pious finger-waggers who have taken to the high ledges to point at James O’Keefe, upon his recent arrest in New Orleans.

In an interview with Matt C. Abbott of RenewAmerica.com, Ms. Eden blasts the work of O’Keefe, Hannah Giles, and Lila Rose of Live Action Films (O’Keefe’s partner in the Planned Parenthood investigations):

We noted that Alinsky’s tactics ran directly counter to St. Paul’s dictum that we cannot do evil that good may come. Live Action’s work, like O’Keefe’s, uses the means of lying and deception in order to accomplish a good, which in their case is pointing out the lying and deception of Planned Parenthood.

About the ACORN investigation, she continues:

Was it really necessary to have an undergrad disguised as a scantily clad prostitute to expose the organization?

Well, it worked, didn’t it? With an enveloping sigh of disdain, Eden and Doino write: (more…)