———–

We think maybe Tommy Christoper took some night classes in creative writing at Middlebury College or something because his response to Retracto’s correction request from last week show a distinctive shift in writing style.  It’s almost as if he had help crafting his very carefully worded response.  We know that the ownership at Mediaite boasts some very impressive legal minds, with skills in crafting words in just the right way, so maybe this response was more of a team effort.

From the opening paragraph, Christopher attempts to re-frame his own argument making it much easier for him to respond to Retracto’s specific correction requests.

Last week, I posted a response to Andrew Breitbart’s claim that he had proven, with the help of the New York Times, that nothing “racially charged” happened on March 20, 2010, when several black members of Congress claimed that they heard racial epithets directed at them by a crowd of protesters. He challenged the MSM to “air the exculpatory evidence” that he had posted, which I did.

Since then, some of the writers from Breitbart’s “Big” sites have responded to my response, and in doing so, have walked back on Breitbart’s original claim. They have demanded corrections to my piece. I am always happy to correct the record where necessary.

It is important to note that my article was not intended to prove anything more than that Breitbart’s “exculpatory evidence” doesn’t prove anything, and that news outlets were justified in reporting the story in the first place. Andrew Breitbart asked for an airing of his video, and that’s what Mediaite gave him.

Read the rest (and please, feel free to comment) here.

Just for the record, here’s somebody named Tommy Christopher, taking El Rushbo to task:

So, let me get this straight: Rush Limbaugh tricks people into talking about the xenophobic things he says by…saying xenophobic things? It’s like saying, “Hey, watch me tweak these cops,” and then smacking a cop in the face. Yes, you have cagily manipulated that cop into arresting you. Good show!

Limbaugh does, however, make a good point about GOP “strategerist” John Feehery’s response to Michael Smerconish. He says that Obama isn’t the first anti-American president, not that he isn’t anti-American. It was a slick bit of simultaneous cake-having-and-eating.

Smerconish is right, though, to ask if Limbaugh is making Republicans look bad with his inflammatory comments, because he is making Republicans look bad with his inflammatory comments. The fact that he hides behind his impish “tweaking” excuse only proves him a coward in the process.

We don’t get it either.

Let me answer his two main arguments immediately and then provide detailed and sourced evidence to support me answers:

1. There is corroborating evidence from three eyewitnesses who said the racial slurs occurred

WRONG: There is one witness with no corroboration. And that witness is NOT civil-rights hero Rep. John Lewis. (more below)

2. The five videos showing the moment the slurs were supposed to have taken place don’t reveal what each and every person present is saying, therefore, it does not prove the racial slurs didn’t happen.

WRONG: The videos we have provided of the incident unequivocally prove that the scene described by the one witness is a complete fabrication. Furthermore, it is not incumbent on the accused to prove something did not happen, it is incumbent on the accuser to prove that it did.

To back-up his claim that there is corroborating evidence from three respected congressmen, Tommy links to two articles: The original report from McClatchy that started the “N-word” story in the first place and a subsequent piece in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution by Cynthia Tucker where she discusses the matter with Rep. John Lewis.

For three eyewitness testimonies to be “corroborating” they need to support one another’s version of the events. Let’s look at each person’s testimony:

First, Rep. John Lewis has never been quoted on the record by any publication saying he heard racial slurs. Even in the one-on-one interview Ms. Tucker conducted in the AJC, Rep. Lewis himself is not quoted.

Next, Rep. Cleaver’s testimony from the day of the alleged event is:

Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, D-Mo., said he was a few yards behind Lewis and distinctly heard “nigger.”

“It was a chorus,” Cleaver said. “In a way, I feel sorry for those people who are doing this nasty stuff – they’re being whipped up. I decided I wouldn’t be angry with any of them.”

Cleaver’s office said later in a statement that he’d also been spat upon and that Capitol Police had arrested his assailant. The statement praised the police, who Cleaver said escorted the members of Congress into the Capitol past the demonstrators.

The problem with Rep. Cleaver’s compelling statement and testimony is that he was no where near Rep. Lewis as he walked to the Capitol that day. Video evidence proves that fact. Watch:

Now that Rep. Lewis and Rep. Cleaver are eliminated as corroborating witnesses, Tommy is left with one man: Rep Andre Carson.

Rep. Carson inherited the seat his grandmother used to occupy and he has failed to denounce the anti-Semitic ramblings of Louis Farrakhan, the man who eulogized his grandmother at her funeral.

Now, let’s listen to Rep. Carson’s exact description of the events that day, moments after they allegedly occurred:

Rep. Carson says of the scene:

“…kill the bill’”and then the n-word [imitates crowd yelling racial slur] Lewis, his chief of staff, and myself (a former cop) I’m closer to Lewis… [we were] very stoic, looked straight forward, and Capitol Police got the idea. They started surrounding us. It was like a page out of a time machine.

This account brings us to Tommy’s second point which is that the videos we have presented don’t prove everything everyone said therefore they can’t prove the slurs weren’t shouted. Of course, we never suggested they did, but the videos do prove a couple of things.

You can certainly see from the videos we presented that the congressmen are given a wide berth as they trot down the steps at Cannon. They are not surrounded. There are no Capitol Police intervening because there is no need for the Capitol Police. It also hardly looks like a scene that one would anticipate rocks being thrown.

On this point alone the testimony of Rep. Carson should be seen as suspect since his description of the scene is false, let alone his account of what was shouted.

But, specific to the alleged shouts of racial slurs from the individuals in the crowd, let’s again look at how Rep. Carson described the chant:

Cannon….coming out with John Lewis out of the elevator with his chief of staff, and it was just the three of us walking down the steps — ‘kill the bill’, ‘kill the bill’…n – word fifteen times.

Rep. Carson kept repeating the same thing: ‘Kill the bill, kill the bill, N-WORD” and he says he heard it fifteen times. The way Rep. Carson describes it you would think there would be a cadence where the “N-Word” slur fits right in with “Kill the Bill.” And since it is coming fifteen times, you would think that the various camera angles we have offered would pick up the shouts of the slur from the top of the steps, the bottom of the steps, the edge of the curb as the congressmen walk past and the edge of the curb when the congressmen walk into the street. But our cameras don’t pick up anything like what Rep. Carson described.

According to Tommy, if we can’t tell exactly what each person in the videos are saying, despite the fact we have offered video from so many different angles, we must believe Rep. Carson.

Speaking of those camera angles, Tommy asks why we only have 7 – 9 seconds of footage (implying we have left footage on the cutting room floor). The fact is, Tommy only grabbed footage from our latest video (in a series of seven) that we have presented over the past three months. Feel free to look at much longer versions of these videos here, here and here.

Finally, Tommy points to a man walking behind the congressmen. He calls him an “aide” and asks why he is pointing to someone in the crowd. Here’s your answer Tommy: He’s not an aide. He is Rep. John Shadegg from Arizona. And he is not pointing to someone in the crowd, he is giving a “Thumbs-down” indicating he is voting against ObamaCare. And the crowd cheers him for it. See for yourself:

We urge our readers to read all of the links provided here, look at the videos, look at the behavior and the credibility of the accusers and make up your own minds about this issue. The New York Times has already seen fit to correct their reporting on this episode. And it seems the readers of Tommy’s column have made their opinion well heard in the comment section of his post (Jim Treacher’s contribution is particularly entertaining).

Oh how we love Democracy.

Todd is one of those journos that came from Democrat political circles — having worked for Iowa Democrat Senator Tom Harkin’s 1992 presidential run — and then crossed over into the world of “journalism.” With that you just know that he can be as unbiased as the best of them in his reporting. Well, if he can we’ll never know it because so far he has not been. Just the opposite, really.

Todd has done a bang-up job for the left in his journalism career. Likely Todd’s loyalty to the Democrat Party is probably why he felt the need to slam Senator Joe Lieberman last year, for instance. Proving his blindness to real political analysis, Todd claimed that Joe Lieberman was the “polar opposite” of the Senate’s lone socialist Senator Bernie Sanders (officially an “independent”).

In a discussion on the Today Show about the then yet to pass Obamacare bill, Todd said of Lieberman and Sanders, “Meanwhile, the Senate’s two Democratic independents, polar opposites ideologically, are split over the bill’s government-run public option and both are threatening to scuttle the process if they don’t get their way.”

This claim that the two are “polar opposites” is just plain absurd. Lieberman is not very far to the right of socialist Sanders at all except in one respect; support for the war. Other than for his outspoken support of the war on terror and the efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, Senator Joe Lieberman is a dyed-in-the-wool, liberal Democrat all the way down the line. He does not much differ from the left-wing ideas that Sanders spouts and never has.

Chuck Todd, however, felt the need to make some sort of conservative out of Lieberman perhaps because the Senator jettisoned the Democrat Party and ran as an independent for his Connecticut Senate seat. Obviously Todd was dutifully punishing Lieberman in fealty to the party line.

Over the last year, Todd has repeatedly gone out of his way to help Obama soften his failures and push the Democrat’s talking points all while pretending at being a journalist.

In one case last month, Todd appeared on MSNBC’s “Daily Rundown” and waxed hopeful that Obama would use the BP oil spill to push new energy regulations on an already over regulated nation. Echoing White House Chief of Staff Rham Emanuel’s desire not to let a “good crisis go to waste,” Todd hoped that Obama could use the disaster to his own ends.

“So if energy legislation isn’t taken up and dealt with, this would basically be — I hate to put it this way — a wasted disaster,” Todd said in agreement with guest Tom Daschle’s points. Daschle himself is a politician famed for being fired in 2003 from his Democrat Senate leadership position when voters turned him out of office. (See the exchange at about one third of the way through the MSNBC video.)

Chuck Todd is also all about helping The One distance himself from controversy. In a July interview with the president Todd brought up Obama’s controversial recess appointment of Donald Berwick to head Medicare but seemed quite keen to help Obama obviate why the appointment was controversial in the first place.

When he asked Obama about the Berwick appointment, Todd never once explained that Berwick was a proponent of rationing healthcare, preventing the poor and sick from getting it, which is why the appointment is outrageous. Instead, Todd helped guide Obama to blame “the broken system” on the appointment’s controversial component.

Do you think Washington is broken? And the reason I ask you this, because when you appointed – you did the recess appointment of Donald Berwick. You seemed to send the message of one of two things. Either you didn’t want to debate about health care again on Capitol Hill, which got a little raucous a year ago or you know what? “The Senate process is broken and we gotta go around it?”

(See video from The Today Show at about the 9:30 mark).

This appointment had nothing at all to do with Washington being “broken” and everything to do with Obama’s inability to fool enough Senators into agreeing with his appointment of a healthcare radical to head Medicare. Chuck Todd to the rescue, though.

And the Internet? Our friendly NBC correspondent is no fan, especially of the Drudge Report. In an interview conducted by Mediaite’s Tommy Christopher, Chuck Todd revealed his conceit that he and his Old Media cohorts are the only proper guardians of what is “news” when he slammed Drudge.

“You know it when you see it,” Todd told Christopher, “where you see it’s an opinion article allegation, not even a factually based story, that suddenly draws a question simply because the Drudge Report linked to it… There’s no worse crime in journalism these days than simply deciding something’s a story because Drudge links to it… I just don’t happen to think that that’s the proper way for us to decide what’s news.”

We don’t want anyone on the Internet trying to “decide” what’s news, right folks? Let’s leave that to the pros. The rest of us just aren’t qualified.

But wait, Todd isn’t just saying the Internet is illegitimate for determining news. He has also signed on wholeheartedly with the lefty meme that Fox News is similarly illegitimate. Just last February Todd claimed that Fox was “out to undermine 90%” of the journalists out there.

“…there is certain news organizations out here whose agenda is to undermine the 90% of journalists who are just simply trying to cover stories out there. And that’s what really frustrates me about what’s happened in the media landscape. It is a business for some media organizations to undermine the quote-unquote mainstream media because it’s good for their business.”

Interestingly, about “90%” of the rest of the Old Media is filled with leftists as extreme as Todd, as recent evidence suggests.

But it isn’t just the Democrat Party and the Old Media Chuck Todd is out to safeguard. Why, he also wants to protect the Republicans. Mr. Todd wants to make sure none of that unwashed rabble in the tea party movement is allowed to influence the GOP.

In an April ‘09 Today Show segment with host Matt Lauer, Todd was keen to guide his viewers into dismissing as inconsequential the tea party events then being held by the hundreds all across the country.

“There’s been some grassroots conservatives who have organized so-called ‘tea parties’ around the company–country hoping the historical reference will help galvanize Americans against the president’s economic ideas,” Todd told Lauer. “But I tell you, the idea hasn’t really caught on,” he assured everyone.

Trenchant commentary that.

So what do we have with a Chuck Todd? A former Democratic operative turned journalist that hates Fox News, denigrates the Internet, covers for Obama, pushes the left’s narrative, and hates the tea party movement.

Yeah… that’s pretty unbiased. And this is why Chuck Todd figures into our top ten most left-biased American journalists.

With only three more spots to fill, please check back tomorrow for left-biased journalist number three as our series begins to wind down.

Mediaite wonders: Actions of a “hero?”

Colby Hall, one of the editors of a major news site, is trying to start some kind of meme/talking point that a Congressman laying his hands on a couple of polite college students might make the Congressman some kind of hero. Incredibly, Hall calls this assault ” only partially defensible.” Looks like Hall’s on the same page as the Democrats who just issued talking points ordering their minions to blame Andrew Breitbart (who’s out of the country, by the way) for the assault.

Worse than that, Hall wants to put part of the blame on Big Government, James O’Keefe and Jason Mattera:

But somehow, one gets the sense that there are legions of viewers out there that will be happy with his reply. …

Big Government (the site that gave us the hidden camera video that took down ACORN) is telling us to expect more of this sort of inflammatory and guerrilla interview tactics, well then, we should be seeing more of this. And that fact is not lost on many elected officials who are probably on edge, half-expecting to be ambushed around every corner. Such is the case here.

Etheridge’s actions are only partially defensible. He need not have gotten physical with the students who asked him the provocative question regarding his support of the “Obama Agenda” (honestly, that sort of opening question is straight from the Jason Mattera school of inflammatory interview techniques.)

I guess ambush/inflammatory interview techniques — you know, what made 60 Minutes and Mike Wallace famous — aren’t to be used by the great unwashed everyday citizen-journalists.

But just whom is Colby Hall absolutely fine with using inflammatory/ambush techniques? Why Mediaite, of course! And their very own Tommy -We Got Him!- Christopher.

Watch this video and compare the calm, cool behavior of the students who approached Comgressman Etheridge with Tommy The Badgering Racebaiter Christopher’s partisan attack on our own Andrew Breitbart.

Never in a million years (unlike Colby Hall) would I endorse or encourage someone laying their hands on another person. It’s just not done in a civilized society. But I do have two questions:

1. Watch both videos and tell me who’s more deserving of a little manhandling? Mediaite’s own Tommy Christopher or those students who approached the Congressman?
2. Had Andrew Breitbart laid even a pinky-finger on Tommy Christopher, do you think Colby Hall would’ve wondered aloud to the world if Andrew was some kind of hero?

Just one question- did any one even read the article? The inflammatory thesis that the Tea Parties are “non-inclusive” is based upon one interview with a Tea Party Participant from Harlem who said:

it’s become more of this rally of hate. The tea party leaders should apologize on behalf of the irresponsible comments that were made.

Naturally. So give us the evidence please. Give us one photo, one quote, one video of your supposed “hate rallies” or “irresponsible comments.” Some irresponsible comments have been shared on this site by Lloyd Marcus, but of course that would not prove the point. Luckily, I can save Ms. Thompson’s gaping credibility gap. Here is the long awaited video of “hate rallies” that do attack the president in a racist manner:

They call Thompson an “intrepid and balanced” journalist for scrounging one unsubstantiated quote. Does anyone realize Thompsons WaPo journalistic history includes articles entitled “D.C.’s High-Level Social Scene Now Mingles Black and Whites” wherein she quips:

… the all-white dinner party feels all wrong… (because)… for the first time the face of ultimate power is African American.

Following this logic, she would have to conclude that an all-black dinner party felt “wrong” during the Clinton presidency.

Thompson wrote 14 (!) Post articles about Harvard professor Skip Gates and Cambridge Police Sgt. James Crowley, whose  much trumpeted altercation leading to the Obama beer summit. So where was Thompson when Leader Reid was praising Obama’s “light-skin” and lack of “Negro dialect”? Most likely doing research for her February 5, 2010 article “NAACP gives Reid an A in latest report card,” in which she mentions Reid’s racist remarks only fleetingly.

In a freak example of journalistic integrity, CNN reporter Shannon Travis describes a tolerant Tea Party experience:

[H]ere’s what you don’t often see in the coverage of Tea Party rallies: Patriotic signs professing a love for country; mothers and fathers with their children; African-Americans proudly participating; and senior citizens bopping to a hip-hop rapper. … It is important to show the colorful anger Americans might have against elected leaders and Washington. But people should also see the orange-vested Tea Party hospitality handlers who welcome you with colorful smiles.

There were a few signs that could be seen as offensive to African-Americans. But by and large, no one I spoke with or I heard from on stage said anything that was approaching racist.

Almost everyone I met was welcoming to this African-American television news producer.

All this from a reporter sent embedded in the rallies to find “nuggets of gold,” video and photos of tea partyers waving racist signs as Mediaite’s Tommy Christopher speculated.

Ward Connerly has famously noted that “when all else fails, the Left goes to the default position of using race to achieve its objectives.”

This is a playbook example; it’s just that the playbook is getting old.

Shuster, you may recall, rather famously did battle with Andrew Breitbart and James O’Keefe over the latter’s arrest for his alleged involvement in an attempt to “maliciously interfere” with the telephones at Senator Mary Landrieu’s office. In this preview of our interview, I asked Shuster for his take on the position of people like Andrew Breitbart, Matt Drudge, and James O’Keefe in journalism. His responses were rather surprising.

Shuster’s demeanor, for some reason, brings to mind this famous number from The Music Man:

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.

The left tried to play off the first few ACORN tapes as mere evidence of “just few bad apples.” But as more tapes were released, they soon realized the next defense would have to be that it was just one bad apple tree.

When it was inarguable that the tree itself was completely infected, liberals ran like hell from ACORN, Rep. Nancy Pelosi calling their behavior “despicable” and President Barack Obama saying it was “inappropriate and deserved to be investigated.”

And on February 22, it was announced that ACORN was to dissolve as a national structure (a move nevertheless recognized as more of a mere name-change). So, for the record, not only have Democrats been running from ACORN – now even ACORN is running from ACORN.

But despite all the distance they managed to put between themselves an ACORN, the left still dubbed the investigation an “attack” – and even more curiously, an attack they took personally. And now they want revenge.

Very few – if any – conservatives you meet will tell you they see Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s Watergate investigation as an “attack” on the right. But liberals continuously refer to the ACORN investigation as an “attack.” The rest of us refer to it as an investigation. Nevertheless, to them, “exposing” and “attacking” are synonymous terms, and most of them refuse to even recognize the exposers as anything but attackers.

There is but one reason that not only Bertha Lewis, but the mainstream establishment itself refuses to recognize James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles as investigative journalists, or bitterly add “scare quotes” to the term; it must be because they felt ACORN’s downfall was a team loss, and that they themselves were the ones under investigation. As the former Communist-turned-conservative, Whittaker Chambers, once wrote: “Innocence seldom utters outraged shrieks. Guilt does.”

They first attacked O’Keefe for allegedly “attending a white supremacist forum.” But then Larry O’Connor revealed that the organizer of “white supremacist event” was half-Jewish and half-Korean. Yeah, see, that didn’t work out so well, now, did it?

Their next angle has been echoing the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office contention that the videos were a “heavily edited splice job.”  No they weren’t. And we still await a shred of evidence to the contrary. However, the left doesn’t depend on evidence to support their accusations – they depend on the loudness and repetition of the accusation itself.

But let’s not get distracted by the irrelevent issue of whether O’Keefe wore his “pimp costume” inside the ACORN offices; the point is, he said he was a pimp, and the recorded conversations are clearly understood in that context. Let’s look instead at the larger picture: why are they digging their own graves with their ceaseless and baseless attacks? They know they have no ammunition for a full-frontal assault, so their current tactic is to whisper innuendos about “racial motives” into the parrot cage, wait for the parrots to pick up on them and begin squawking loudly, and then ask the target: So how do you respond to what the parrots are squawking? Hey, don’t look at me! I didn’t make the accusation – the parrots did.

Imagine if such tactics were employed by conservative reporters: “So, Secretary Gibbs, how would you respond to allegations that Jeremiah Wright has been a secret monthly guest in the Lincoln bedroom? I’m not making the allegation, I’m just asking how you would respond to it.” Of course, no one on the left would take issue with such a question – because it’s only a question, right?

Tommy Christopher apparently thinks we’re that stupid. When I asked him why he has invested so much energy into dignifying a preposterous question with repetition, he distanced himself from the question itself, screaming: “I didn’t make it up!”

Well I didn’t make up the idea that the moon landing was staged – but you don’t see me chasing down NASA scientists and asking them how they would respond to the allegation.

So perhaps Tommy Christopher did not “make up” the accusations about James’ alleged racial motives, but at least Christopher and I both apparently agree that they were, in fact, made up.

Tommy Christopher is a little more than just an “unabashed liberal.”  Juan Williams never called me a “teabagger.” And for some reason, the guy on record repeatedly denigrating what was the Tea Party spirit of CPAC 2010 with sexual, pornographic slurs, was sent to cover CPAC 2010. For your perusal, a quick Top Five:

“Teabaggers”

5. April 11th, 2009 – Headline: At the Tea-Baggers’ Meeting: Brainwashing Devices Are Coming

I was all set to write about how the media’s mockery of the “Tea Party Movement,” re-dubbed “Tea-bagging” by the sexual-slang-ignorant Griff Jenkins, is threatening to turn the sac-obsessed revolutionaries into sympathetic figures. I mean, we get it. Tea-bagging has 2 meanings. Actually, it really only has one.

But then, Political Machine trollbuster Cube sent me this video, which is too good to pass up. I’ll scold my fellows tomorrow. Today, we feast on tea-baggy awesomeness. The fun really starts at about the 3:30 mark.

4. April 15th, 2009 — Headline: Tea-Baggers Clash With Counter-Protesters in DC

You can give Christopher the benefit of the doubt on this one because he might not write his own headli—Oh, wait, that very same day:

3. April 15th, 2009: And I’ll be posting a confrontation between teabaggers and counter-protesters later today.

And here he is on Mediaite the week before CPAC:

2. February 9th, 2010: Look, it’s a free country, you’re allowed to say “retard,” but I’m also allowed to say you’re a gutless jerk for it, and I’m also allowed to say that Sarah Palin can take her crocodile tears for the families of the disabled and dip some tea bags in ‘em. Apparently, those folks will swallow anything.

Is anyone surprised that all of this arrogant contempt for everyday Americans who simply disagree with Christopher on the size and scope of the federal government culminated in Reason #1 – with someone who automatically equates “pimp” with “black” to project his own prejudices onto others.

What do you say to people who think James’ selection of a pimp costume has racial overtones?”

Kevin McCullough warned us about Christopher’s nasty and unprofessional “gotcha” tactics from his own experience with him at CPAC 2009. So what happened at 2010 doesn’t appear to be a fluke.

And what did McCoullough get for calling Christopher out? He got called a “Nobody Dickbag.”

I must say again that being at CPAC and seeing firsthand how these people operate was a revelation, and a reminder that those engaged in the war to expose and defeat them are fighting the most righteous of wars.

“We got him. We got him.” – Mediaite White House reporter Tommy Christopher to a few people just after badgering Andrew Breitbart with a race-baiting question.

My first CPAC and my first first-person look at how the corrupt left-wing media operates. I can’t pretend that anything surprised me, because as Mama used to always say, “Evil is as evil does.” But yes, Max Blumenthal, Mediaite’s Tommy Christopher and some guy named Daryle Jenkins with something called One People’s Project stalked into CPAC like three old-media hitmen ready and eager to do some dirty work. So eager, in fact, that you could picture them the night before lying in bed at their parents’ house with visions of ambushing right-wingers in their heads.

There was only one problem: the unholy three appear to have forgotten that in this digital age everything’s changed. It‘s no longer just the elites who come heavy. We all carry videos cameras and we all have access to a distribution system Al Gore named the Internet. So a funny thing happened while Max and Daryle were driving dad’s car home, maliciously editing manipulated footage in their heads (you know, kind of like this – gee, Max, what happened to Larry O’Connor catching you in a big fat lie? ), Big Journalism published the unedited footage for the whole world to see, and what the world saw was a raw look at how Journalistic Rendition operates.

And in the case of Tommy Christopher and Mediaite, they did our job for us.

Journalistic Rendition is exactly what it sounds like. Just as the Clinton administration kept its hands clean but still benefited from the intelligence gathered from terrorists shipped off to foreign countries willing to torture – media outlets like Salon and Mediaite benefit from the dirty work they also disavow.

Salon.com shipped their character-assassination assignment off to the unaccountable Max Blumenthal, and by extension Daryle Jenkins. Hoping to punish James O’Keefe for his part in saving the Republic by exposing ACORN, Salon’s obvious desire was to smear O’Keefe as a racist in the hopes of moving the spotlight off a story they’re much less interested in: a taxpayer-subsidized organization that employs a troubling number of intelligent folks disturbingly eager to use their tax-law savvy to aid and abet those who would set up an underage prostitution ring.

And Blumenthal came through for Salon in a big way. The piece hit like a bomb and though it was obvious from the beginning that the very foundation of Blumenthal’s charges could only be supported with provable lies, the piece stayed up on Salon uncorrected for hours.

The Salon smear was so obviously inaccurate that even the Breitbart-obsessed Media Matters stayed away from it and no less than the Columbia Journalism Review found it such an affront to the very idea of journalism that they jumped in and scolded Salon as though there’s still some remaining shred of journalistic honor left to defend.

But Salon’s Journalistic Rendition had worked. After hours of soulless searching and as though they were some kind of legitimate publication, Salon eventually published a correction and the blame fell on Blumenthal and by extension Jenkins. But the fire Salon wanted lit was smoldering and after spreading his lies at the well-trafficked publication, the unaccountable Blumenthal simply moved his smear campaign over to his unaccountable personal website.

See how nicely this worked out? Salon gets to play “Who me?” as the toxic lie of racism they published enters the webstream.

Now, watch this video and listen to Mediaite White House reporter Tommy Christopher’s question to Andrew Breitbart: “What do you say to people who think James’ selection of a pimp costume has racial overtones?” The question is answered more than once and yet Christopher won’t stop. That’s because he’s only a journalist according to Mediaite’s obviously low standards. In the real world he’s a bitterly angry junior league leftist with an ax to grind.

[Side Note to Christopher and Blumenthal: It’s people like you who automatically equate “pimp” with “Black” who should be thinking through their own prejudices.]

From a personal standpoint, Mediaite’s involvement in Journalistic Rendition is the perfect scorpion and frog story. I can’t speak for the other Bigs, but Big Hollywood’s relationship with Mediaite has always been a very friendly one and so surprised was I by Christopher’s wildly unprofessional race-baiting that I was sure his hand-written badge claiming he was from Mediaite was a lie. And when I heard him bragging afterwards — “We got him. We got him.” – I was positive.

Well, the scorpion struck when this pathetic example of Journalistic Rendition published on Mediaite Saturday evening with this equally pathetic disclaimer:

For the record, the thoughts and ideas expressed in this exchange are those of Mediaite columnist White House reporter Tommy Christopher and not those of Mediaite.

Don’t you just love that disavowal? Christopher isn’t some guy who threw the video over the transom. He’s Mediaite’s columnist and White House reporter. He’s “their guy” out on assignment, and not only was Mediaite willing to publish the video, it was their lead story for hours. Shouldn’t the disclaimer have read:

While we are paying for and benefitting from the wildly unprofessional race-baiting of our White House reporter and making this our lead story for hours, we want to assure everyone that we literally brought out a bowl of water and washed our hands before hitting the publish button.

Something else I learned at CPAC is that my boss knows exactly how to treat the media. And I only say that because what you won’t see on YouTube are the two days Andrew spent with a writer from Slate who was both friendly and professional, and in return received every spare minute Andrew had.

Then there are the “We got him” media-types, those under the mistaken belief that a byline, badge and race-baiting questions somehow make up for their deficits as human beings. They were also treated the way they deserved. After all…

We are at war with them because they are at war with truth.

UPDATED: Tommy Christopher’s “We got him, we got him” that I reference throughout this piece should not be confused with his saying “I got you” in the video of his confrontation with Andrew Breitbart. Christopher’s “We got him” happened minutes later in a hallway around the corner after things had broken up.