• Knowing When You've Been Had.

    Mack Lyons Thursday, March 08, 2012 , , , , ,
    So not long before Andrew Breitbart kicked the bucket, he hinted at CPAC that he had a little something on President Barack Obama. Something so shocking, so earth shattering that it would change the way we would perceive the president and have us question the whole "hope" and "change" thing. In other words, it was supposed to make us all bitter cynics who'd become so disillusioned that we'd immediately turn our backs on Obama and let the 100,000 or so die-hard Teabaggers usher yet another wave of Republican perfidity into office for the next four to twelve years.

    But then, he died. So Stephen Bannon, Joel Pollak and Larry O’Connor started making the media rounds, announcing that they had their hands on what was supposed to be proof of Obama's own perfidity at its worst, as his past life as a radical Marxist Socialist heathen would once and for all be revealed to a shocked and dismayed public. I swear, these people are really GOP operatives in vaguely liberal clothing.

    This was supposed to be Watergate all over again, at least for them. It wasn't.


    Damn. Either Breitbart was truly and genuinely pathetic or this man managed to punk the living shit out of his fellow conservative minions:


    Sorry, conservatives. Seems like Breitbart's left you guys a huge jar of Deez Nuts™, roasted and salted.

    "Bu...bu...but that's not the right tape! It was selectively edited! We have the real tape...somewhere!" So said the folks at Breitbart.com. PBS Frontline called "Bullshit!" on that.

    FRONTLINE producers obtained the footage from the same source as BuzzFeed did this week: the archives of WGBH, Boston’s PBS station. The footage was shot in 1990 by a team of local news producers for the WGBH Ten O’Clock News. FRONTLINE is produced at WGBH and our producers were alerted to the footage in the station archives in 2008.

    In light of today’s controversy, and Breitbart.com editors’ claims that the footage had been edited, we pulled the full archived tape. It includes not just Obama’s speech, but other footage from the rally and portions of Derrick Bell’s speech. You can watch it in full below.

    I wonder how it feels for a hack team to get bitch-slapped by an actual news organization.* That's gotta sting something fierce.

    So either Breitbart planned this stunt as a sort of going away present for his "friends" or his entire legacy's come to this: bullshit served on a silver platter to people desperate enough to believe it something else and eat it, only to realize what it was during the last few bites. Those were Breitbart's followers - too lightweight to roll with the Fox News Teabagger crowd, but not willing to just stay on the porch, either.

    People are having fun with this on Twitter. Check out this Chirpstory and the #BreitbartHasTape Twitter tag.

    *Yeah, yeah, PBS isn't exactly CNN, but they're by far better than most media outlets, bar none.