September 21 ,2009

Remember the days of Vince Foster murder conspiracies, endless Whitewater investigations, and witch hunts by special prosecutors?

Well, in the wake of the Fox News ACORN videos and Glenn Beck's rants, the first calls for a special prosecutor have already begun, in the pages of Chicago Tribune,by Charles Lipson, a political science professor at the University of Chicago who asserts that "although no allegations have yet touched the Obama campaign, ACORN did have significant ties to the campaign and other progressive causes. Published reports show that ACORN and its subsidiaries received some $800,000 from the Obama campaign to get out the vote."

The story began, of course, after two conservative activists, Hannah Giles and James O'Keefe, ran a sting operation with hidden cameras by posing as a prostitute and a pimp and approaching several ACORN offices around the country where they found employees who offered assistance.

All the ACORN employees involved have since been fired and federal aid to ACORN has been cut off. But, as Media Matters points out, Fox News coverage, which has all but given the impression that a prostitution ring is being run out of Obama White House, is full of shortcomings.

Perhaps most notable is the repeated assertion by Fox's Glenn Beck and Gretchen Carlson that one ACORN employee in San Bernardino, California, Tresa Kaelke, shot and killed her husband. In one of the videos, Kaelke claimed to have killed her ex-husband, but she later explained that she made the assertion simply because she was suspicious of the undercover video "journalists." According to a press release from the San Bernardino Police Department, both of Kaelke's ex-husbands are very much alive.

Omitted from most of the coverage was the provenance of the Fox videos, which first appeared on BigGovernment.com, which is run by Matt Drudge protege Andrew Breitbart.  As for Giles and O'Keefe, who actually created the videos, both are conservative activists more than journalists. The daughter of right wing blogger Doug Giles,Hannah Giles attended the conservative National Journalism Center, the alma mater of Ann Coulter which was set up by M. Stanton Evans, a champion of Joe McCarthy, to produce activist young "journalists" who intern at right wing media outlets(Fox News, Sean Hannity Show, News Max, Human Events, The Washington Times, etc.) before graduating and moving to more mainstream outlets such as The New York Times, Washington Post, ABC, CBS, NBC, Time, Newsweek, etc. For his part, O'Keefe has been a conservative activist who is best known for creating a video attacking Planned Parenthood in which a caller donates money to abort black babies.

Whether a special prosecutor actually gets appointed remains to be seen. But whether it is Glenn Beck's 9/12 Tea Party, the campaign to destroy health care, or Rush Limbaugh's false assertion that Obamacare will mandate circumcision, expect more to come--and don't be surprised if culminates with an impeachment movement.