MEMORANDUM

To:                   Eric Boehlert, Media Matters
From:               David Axelrod

Personal and Confidential

SUBJECT:       BREITBART

“O’Keefe’s humiliating guilty plea”—is that the best you could do?  Perhaps I didn’t make myself clear yesterday.  We don’t want to embarrass Breitbart; we want to destroy him.  O’Keefe is the instrument–if we act decisively.

Forget BP and Sestak.  Put Stossel, Beck, and O’Reilly on the back burner for now.  Call in your people who are sitting in toilet stalls around Washington hoping to snag a Republican congressman on the next john over.  Devote all your resources to mounting a sustained effort to morph O’Keefe’s “entry under false pretenses” charge (hey — they could get everyone in Congress on that beef! Little joke there) into a McVeigh-level atrocity sponsored by Breitbart.

The whole crew at MSNBC will be pounding on Breitbart’s mania to foster civil chaos in America as long as it takes to make the charge resonate.  He will be Olbermann’s first “Worst Person of the Millenium.”  The Times and Post have assured me they’ll give the matter their full Abu Ghraib treatment, starting with above-the-fold articles this weekend.  Williams, Couric, and Sawyer will jump on the story after a decent interval, citing a “raging controversy.”  Time Magazine’s cover next week, I have on good authority right from Rick Stengel, will feature a caricature of Breitbart setting fire to an SEIU T-shirt in front of the White House, with the headline: “What Are the Limits of Dissent in Obama’s America?”

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When public indignation reaches white heat (or even if it doesn’t), the entire House Democratic caucus (and a few Republican simpletons) will demand that Attorney General Holder appoint a Special Counsel to investigate the Breitbart affair.  He will immediately agree.  I understand Ramsey Clark will make himself available to Justice, and believe me there are plenty of empty cells down at Gitmo.

Related matters:

Big Journalism’s mascot, Retracto, the Correction Alpaca, has been attacking your credibility with some success.  You need a counter.  I suggest Rumo, the Calumny Capybara.  Make him another Senior Fellow — what difference does one more make? Soros is loaded.

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Also, we have to offset our PR setback the other day at the house of the Bank of America official.  Be advised that hundreds of SEIU members wearing “Tea Party 2010” tees will descend on the homes of Media Matters’ principals at noon tomorrow — while they’re at work — to protest . . . something or other. After all, it’s a normal course of action for this group.

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They will arrive in Tea-Party-labeled buses sporting Sarah Palin’s image.  Ostensibly to keep things under control and to ensure the safety of our people, protestors will be escorted by hefty Huffington Posters posing as skinheads.  Please remind your Senior Fellows to keep their children home from school that day, and not forewarned: we want the kids to show unfeigned terror at the mock-harassment—including frantic calls to 911 that Maddow can replay endlessly.  Local authorities have been tasked to identify and roust neighboring real journalists to avoid a Nina Easton fiasco in reverse.

Please call me if you have any questions.  I don’t need to tell you that the Boss is taking a personal interest in this one. From one “journalist” to another — look how far you can go if you play your cards right.

Now get to work.

DA/sg

(dictated but not read)