“A tiny water boatman is the loudest animal on Earth relative to its body size, a study has revealed. Scientists from France and Scotland recorded the aquatic animal “singing” at up to 99.2 decibels, the equivalent of listening to a loud orchestra play while sitting in the front row. The insect makes the sound by rubbing its penis against its abdomen in a process known as ‘stridulation’. Researchers say the song is a courtship display performed to attract a mate.” There is audio, if you are so inclined.

“Mark Halperin, editor-at-large for Time, called President Obama ‘a dick’ on Thursday on a popular MSNBC morning show and then quickly apologized.”
 — This sentence is so objectionable! I mean, “Morning Joe” gets about 450,000 total viewers, so I’m not sure you can really call it “popular.” Anyway, so then host Joe Scarborough apologized to the children watching. What horrible monster parents are letting their kids watch this garbage? I know school ended this week but Jesus H, people, get it together.

Football And Nachos, The Texan Way

by Maud Newton

In a marriage otherwise marked by acrimony and the hurling of dishes, my parents always agreed on one thing: that we rooted for the Cowboys. The allegiance was, to say the least, unpopular in Miami, where we moved from Texas in 1973, much too soon after Dallas crushed the Dolphins in Super Bowl VI. I was two then, and some of my earliest memories involve the three of us gathering in front of the TV to watch the star-helmeted men stand around kicking the grass, amble into formation, and then tear across the field, chased by or chasing men in some other kind of helmet. From time to time my mother would leap from her seat and bring her fists down before her in distress and supplication, while screaming, “Git ‘ihhhm!”

“Knock ‘ihhm down!” my father would echo from his corner chair.

The team loomed so large in our household and in my mind that, by kindergarten, I’d somehow gotten the quarterback confused with Paul Revere. When the principal asked in a school assembly if anyone knew who was famous for shouting “The British are coming!” I yelled out “Roger Dodger.”

I can see now how insufferable all the “America’s Team” hoopla must’ve been to loyal fans of other franchises. In my defense, I can only say that the ’80s were some mighty lean years in Marino Miami, and, though my team was winning by then, the ’90s weren’t much better. After Tom Landry and his sportcoat and Stetson fedora were so heartlessly and unceremoniously sent packing, I couldn’t find it in my heart to root for Jimmy Johnson’s thugs.

Now, living in Giants country, I’ve rediscovered my Dallas passion, theoretically. The trouble is, my husband loathes football; none of my friends can stomach the Cowboys; and the only person I know who’ll root for them with me is my sister, who’s three hours away by train (and is, she claims, the only lesbian in the greater Northampton, Massachusetts area whose TV is tuned to ESPN on Monday nights in the fall). To me, football games are a communal activity, so they, and the snacks I associate with them, are mostly nostalgic. This weekend I aim to change that, as far as the food is concerned.

What we often ate while watching those games in my childhood was my mom’s version of nachos, made by dressing thirty tortilla chips each with a dab of refried beans, a small square of cheddar, and a jalapeno slice, and putting them into the oven to bake. I thought she and my grandmother had invented this variation, which I’ve always secretly preferred to the goopy basket of chips and toppings you get when you order nachos in restaurants. In fact, according to Lisa Fain, whose Homesick Texan blog is the best culinary resource I’ve found for gringo Texan expats, my family’s way came first.

“For me, and for every Texan, there is only one kind of nacho,” Fain says. Each “is its own entity (and that is key), with just enough toppings to give it flavor and a bit of heft but not enough to make it saggy or soggy. Anything else is an impostor!” She goes on:

Nachos are reputed to have been invented in 1943 by a maitre d’ named Ignacio Anaya who was working at the Victory Club in Piedras Negras, Mexico, which is just across the border from Eagle Pass, Texas. As the story goes, some ladies from Eagle Pass came into the restaurant one evening, ordered some drinks and wanted some snacks. The kitchen was already closed, so Anaya melted some Longhorn cheddar on some tortilla chips and garnished each chip with a jalapeno slice. He presented them to the ladies calling his improvised appetizer “Nacho’s Especiales” as Nacho is a nickname for Ignacio. And the name, without the “especiales,” stuck.

Nachos were made only this way until 1977 when a San Antonio businessman named Frank Liberto started selling melted processed-cheese food to Arlington Stadium. You know, the gross stuff that comes out of a pump. (Not to be confused with queso which is far, far superior!) He called it “nacho cheese” and it was served with tortilla chips. As the story goes, sportscaster Howard Cosell tried some, loved it and extolled the virtues of these “nachos” on national TV. And a taste sensation took off, but sadly it was misinterpreted. Instead of the exquisite traditional nacho of one chip with a topping, people thought nachos were a mountain of chips with melted processed cheese. It was a very dark day in the history of this beloved Tex-Mex treat.

Rosecrans Baldwin, also a partisan of the older, simpler variety, jokes that nachos nowadays “are the martinis of snack food: a simple recipe that has been abused to scrape money off drunks. Don’t get me started on bars that drench them in sour cream and watery salsas, like burial mounds. Or ballpark nachos, with salt licks disguised as chips and a side of chemicals. Disgusting examples abound — sashimi nachos; salad nachos lacking cheese. I’m sure in Los Angeles you can order a green-apple nacho plate, with Red Bull. Nachos should not be complicated.” I can’t improve on the elegance of the Homesick Texan’s recipe, which should taste as good come football season as it will this Saturday night, when I’m sitting out on the terrace with a Corona during a break in the Mets(-Yankees) game.

Maud Newton is a writer and critic best known for her blog, where she has written about books since 2002.

Photo by Lisa Fain, used with permission.

Are you following tennis great Novak Djokovic on the Internets? He has been documenting his attempt to get with a squirrel for days. This is how you prepare for Wimbledon quarterfinals.

Today in “yeah, no”: “Less permanent than a tattoo and now proving to be just as popular, hairy back art, or HBA, is said to have started becoming a trend in Europe and is now catching on at this side of the Atlantic. Previously, men would simply cover up their back fur — or better still — hot foot it down to a waxist and get that carpet stripped right off. But now, never fear hairy-backed men, your body is your canvas.”

by Abe Sauer

“Because brother, I have been there, when some would-be ‘reputable’ journalist who’s just been severely ass-whipped by a relative no-name freelancer on an enormous story fights back by going on television and, without any evidence at all, accusing the guy who beat him of cheating. That’s happened to me so often, I’ve come to expect it. If there’s a lower form of life on the planet earth than a ‘reputable’ journalist protecting his territory, I haven’t seen it.”

That description of the lowest form of life reporter Matt Taibbi has ever found on planet earth came exactly one year ago yesterday. It was directed at Lara Logan (“Lara Logan, You Suck”) after she criticized Rolling Stone for printing scandalous statements by General McChrystal’s team.

A year later, when I confronted him about the fact that his profile of Michele Bachmann contained a whole lot of unattributed information, including quotes, that came from reports and profiles written by smaller blogs and local papers years ago, Taibbi’s defense included leaning on his alt-weekly background. The old “I know what it’s like, dude” thing.

The old “I come from an alt weekly background too” excuse was the same thing his Rolling Stone editor, Eric Bates, trotted out when he faced questions about why he cut at least three source attributions in Taibbi’s final draft — something Bates said he did “for space.”

As Slate’s Jack Shafer asked The Cutline about the decision: “How big was the art hole on that piece? Huge, I’ll bet.”

He bet right. No space there.

In addition to cutting mention of three sources, the Rolling Stone piece appears to make a conscious effort not to credit anyone for any information.

In 5,200-words, only two sources show up: the program “Hardball” and the Washington Post — both for recent quotes from Bachmann. That despite passages like the following, which, given the other quotes, well….

Rolling Stone:

Maple River was so out there that Minnesota’s then-governor, Jesse Ventura, no slouch in the batshit-conspiracy department, dismissed the group as nothing but a bunch of people who “think UFOs are landing next month.”

City Pages, 2006:

Former Governor Jesse Ventura once said of them, “The Maple River group, they think UFOs are landing next month. They think it’s some big government federal conspiracy!”

In the end, the original material published by Rolling Stone amounts to quotes from four people: Chris Littleton, an Ohio Tea Party leader, and Elwyn Tinklenberg and Mary Cecconi, both candidiates who lost to Bachmann in elections, the latter a lobbyist for Democratic causes.

The fourth person Taibbi speaks with is Bill Prendergast, who’s credited as “a Stillwater resident who wrote for the town’s newspaper and has documented every step of Bachmann’s career.”

The newspaper was the Stillwater Gazette and Prendergast was fired from his column there on Oct. 12, 2005. The position he was asked to leave was unpaid.

Later Prendergast joined the Dump Bachmann blog where he wrote about Bachmann until he left, on less than amicable terms, in part because of posts like this. Today Prendergast blogs for The Daily Kos and the Minnesota Progressive Project.

That Rolling Stone’s concern about space led to the removal of the City Pages citations doesn’t explain how Bill Prendergast’s bio was reduced to a job he only held for two years and which he has not held in more than five.

In the course of Bates explaining that this all wasn’t that big a deal, he emailed that it “started out being more about her campaign and her relationship to the Tea Party, so Stillwater didn’t come up when Matt planned his travel” and that “it wasn’t until toward the end that I asked him to shift to include more about her background, which brought Stillwater into the story more.”

A hastily changed focus that necessitated more information on short notice. Happens all the time.

Unless Bates was trying to make the piece seem more robust than it really was, and make it appear as if the paper’s new-millennium answer to Hunter Thompson had “done it again.” The day the magazine came out, Taibbi was already booked to appear on Imus and a number of other stops on the well-worn pony ride circle of screaming professional opinion-havers. (To kick off his interview, Imus said he hadn’t read the piece yet.)

Taibbi has become a kind of late-stage Dali employed by Rolling Stone as masthead juice to be rolled out every time it wants to give some in-the-now high-pageview political figure “the Taibbi treatment.”

Jeff Bercovici at Forbes notes that even Taibbi is becoming a bad version of Taibbi:

“[Taibbi] described Mike Huckabee as a ‘wild-eyed Baptist goofball,’ a ‘Christian goofball of the highest order,’ a ‘religious zealot,’ ‘full-blown nuts’ and ‘batshit.’

Compare that with his characterization of Bachmann: ‘a religious zealot’ who has ‘strangely unfocused eyes’ and ‘may seem like a goofball’ but is actually ‘completely batshit crazy.’”

I would add to Bercovici’s good examples Taibbi’s description, in the same piece, of Jesse Ventura as “no slouch in the batshit-conspiracy department.” And in an October, 2010, Rolling Stone piece (“The Truth About the Tea Party”) Taibbi described Rand Paul’s views as “flat-out batshit crazy.” It all started back in his book The Great Derangement, where Taibbi describes the world of a Texas church as “utterly batshit.” (In that same book, guess what word he uses to describe the process of being “born again”?) Meanwhile, members of the congregation? “Goofballs.”

While doing an interview on Majority.fm radio, after agreeing with the host’s statement that “Bachmann isn’t crazy like Sarah Palin is crazy,” Taibbi added that “Sarah Palin is just a goofball.” Taibbi garnished that by saying Bachmann was kind of like Osama bin Laden.

(Incidentally, Taibbi’s written about Sarah Palin too, in the October 2 issue of Rolling Stone. There he called Palin “a religious zealot” and “cross-eyed political neophyte.” Also in that profile, Taibbi calls Palin a “small-town girl” who thinks “the PTA minutes are Holy Writ.” More recently, of Bachmann: a “small-town PTA maven.”)

When I reached out to Bates again for comment, I got a message back from the Wenner Media PR department: “Eric is on vacation, and very hard to reach.” Then they stopped answering emails.

Taibbi is also no longer responding to questions, though he did respond to The Cutline to say, “I grew up in alternative newspapers and have been in the position the City Pages reporter is in, so I’m sympathetic. They did good work in that piece and deserve to be credited. But you should know also that this isn’t plagiarism — it’s not even an allegation of plagiarism. It’s an attribution issue.” Rolling Stone PR also took it up with The Cutline’s use of the “P” word.

Taibbi, for his part, seems genuinely regretful about the way things went down. (Or maybe he remembers his own statement about Logan.) He sent an email to me a day after the first Awl piece:

Abe,

This is not for publication —

Do you have contact info for G.R. Anderson? I want to call him to offer an explanation, and, if Eric allows me to do so on behalf of the magazine, an apology.

MT

[Editor’s Note: The Awl is always happy to speak to people in confidence, but that arrangement isn’t reached by a demand: it’s an agreement.]

Anderson, the writer of the original City Pages piece (as well as many others about Bachmann’s early days) did not yet get that apology.

“What good would it do me?” G.R. Anderson told me. He added, “If nothing else, this kerfluffle has shed light on a side of Bachmann that I know well, and felt then as I do now, that interested citizens need to know. So, that’s an upside.” Anderson, who graduated from Columbia journalism school just as Bates did, laments what the whole thing means to journalists — because they are “not held in high regard in opinion polls, and these things don’t help. In fact, it saddens me, because it hurts the reputations of good, hard-working journalists who only have credibility to offer.”

Anderson had actually pitched Bates the very story from which Bates got to remove Anderson’s credit. During the 2008 campaign cycle, he pitched Bates “some stories on Coleman-Franken, Obama in MN and Bachmann’s influence on the electorate in what was deigned a swing state of sorts.”

Anderson says that he still has a trove of information he’s never published, including, for example, church bulletin notices that Bachmann wrote. He got those by going down to her church and convincing one of the administrators there to hand them over. He’s also emailed with one of her children. Of going back to covering the candidate he tells me is the “most dark and cynical politician” he has ever seen, Anderson said the thought kind of depresses him: “Journalists are people too.”

Anderson, who now teaches some journalism classes at the University of Minnesota, predicts Bachmann will win Iowa, lose New Hampshire and end up “on Mitt Romney’s undercard.”

A wrench on the works of the Chicken Little Bachmann Rising narrative is that Michele Bachmann may be running for president because it’s the only thing left for which she might run. A June, 2011 Public Policy Polling survey found that only 10 percent of Minnesotans wanted Bachmann to run for re-election. In the 2010 election, which produced the greatest Republican congressional victory landslide of all time, Bachmann won with 52.5 percent of the vote, her highest victory margin ever. (Compare that to, say, Paul Ryan’s 68 percent.)

Among the 154 incumbent Republicans who won their re-election bids in 2010, Bachmann’s margin was the sixth closest. Hardly indicative of a powerful pol. Still, Anderson doubts this, saying he’s totally confident she can hold her seat “as long as she wants.”

Where Taibbi was more correct than anywhere else, and even presciently so, given what just happened with “John Wayne” in Iowa, is this:

When you laugh at Michele Bachmann for going on MSNBC and blurting out that the moon is made of red communist cheese, these people don’t learn that she is wrong. What they learn is that you’re a dick, that they hate you more than ever, and that they’re even more determined now to support anyone who promises not to laugh at their own visions and fantasies.

That’s why, despite all the invective knitted together from others’ work on behalf of the Olbermann circuit, what will really bring Bachmann down with primary voters is investigative work such as NBC News’ recent findings that “While Rep. Michelle Bachmann, R-Minn., has forcefully denounced the Medicaid program for swelling the ‘welfare rolls,’ the mental health clinic run by her husband has been collecting annual Medicaid payments totaling over $137,000 for the treatment of patients since 2005.”

Update 6/29 PM: Taibbi’s just posted June 29 Rolling Stone blog entry on Bachmann’s campaign start ends… curiously:

“Anyway, I would advise anyone who wants to know more about Bachmann to read a new book on her by William Prendergast and Chris Truscott called Michele Bachmann’s America. Prendergast, who lives in Bachmann’s hometown of Stillwater, Minnesota and has been following her for years, is like the living oracle of Bachmann, and walked me through her whole life story on the telephone a few weeks ago. The book is available in Kindle version.”

Abe Sauer can be reached at abesauer at gmail dot com. He is on Twitter.

“I’m an outspoken supporter of the Canadian trio, and mean no offense to fans of the band. But I wanted to offer these photos as proof that there’s no place on the planet lonelier than the women’s bathroom at a Rush concert.” [Via]

What was your first online handle?

by Michael Tracey

When Andrew Breitbart commandeered Anthony Weiner’s admission-of-digital-lecherousness press conference earlier this month, just seven minutes elapsed before he began to recount the tale of how America was first introduced to his strange media empire. In 2009, James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles approached Breitbart with footage of low-level ACORN employees apparently offering to abet the proprietors of an illegal immigrant child prostitution ring. “To those who say your journalism here is suspect,” a reporter asked, “what do you tell those folks?” Breitbart snickered.

“’You’re going to be held to a different standard,’” Breitbart said he told O’Keefe and Giles at the time. “But I said, what we’re going to do is, we’re going to put the full transcripts and the full audio of these visits, so nobody suspects that you cut these things up to put words into their mouths.”

So they did publish the full transcripts and audio. But spliced into the edited version — the version that would be widely circulated — were montages of O’Keefe dressed as a pimp and assuredly strutting down city sidewalks. This gave the impression that he’d donned the outlandish getup while receiving tax advice from oblivious ACORN employees. The transcripts showed otherwise: O’Keefe described himself as a future law student, and he was wearing a shirt and tie.

That the episode diminished his credibility, O’Keefe maintains, is confirmation of what Breitbart warned him about two years ago: double-standards. Pervasive, deeply-entrenched, odious double-standards. The truncated video was only “selectively edited,” he told me recently, if traditional television stations can also be accused of “selectively editing” their content everyday. “I have to release the full unedited interview of all my stuff?” O’Keefe asked. “But the New York Times can talk to me for an hour-and-a-half and print two words? It’s disgusting.”

O’Keefe seemed to anticipate that he’d be the object of unwarranted scorn. “It is time…” he wrote in 2009, “for conservative activists to ‘create chaos for glory.’” If creating chaos was his goal, he must’ve also known that people don’t generally appreciate chaos.

“’Well James, you’re a political actor,’” O’Keefe went on, imitating a hypothetical detractor. “Yeah, I don’t get taxpayer money, and I actually release my full interviews with my subjects. So the whole thing is bullshit. And then they have the conceit, the conceit, to demand that I release my full unedited tapes? When the USA Today calls me for an hour, 70 minutes, and releases two sentences? They’re hypocrites.”

Late last year, O’Keefe released unflattering recordings of teachers and administrators at a conference in New Jersey.

Q. Teachers come close to private citizens, in my view. They don’t make policy…. So to have that woman be representative of the teachers union’s overarching philosophy, I think was a bit of an unfair characterization, whatever intemperate remarks she might have made.

A. I think that you’re probably right on one thing. That teachers union investigation probably came close to an ethical line. Because it’s at a bar setting at a leadership conference. They’re not in schools, right? But I chose to publish that comment she made. First of all, the other comments about kicking the governor in his toolbox, I mean, there were like fifty of them chiming that. You don’t have any expectation of privacy. There’s fifty of you singing along, I mean, give me a break.

* * *

James O’Keefe’s operational philosophy doesn’t distinguish between criticism of his tactics and criticism of his targets. To his mind, he is one of the few journalists whose wellspring of virtue has not yet been infected by leftist duplicity. O’Keefe feeds on the angered response — much like Breitbart, who was absolutely radiating with joy at the Weiner presser. The two are guided by the same motivation: Americans live in a state of perpetual warfare, whether they know it or not, and the onus to challenge Cultural Marxist orthodoxies falls on a select few. They are among the chosen.

O’Keefe’s chaos has spawned Congressional investigations, forced the resignation of media executives, and is routinely referenced by national political figures — and he is just 27. Late last year, when O’Keefe released a series of videos from the New Jersey Teachers Union’s annual conference that documented attendees singing “Let’s have a whiskey and get a little misty. Join me now and slander Chris Christie!,” the governor, within hours, praised O’Keefe’s work as evidence that organized labor was just as depraved as he’d always suggested.

“I can tell you the distinction between me and all those people,” O’Keefe said, referring to a nebulous elite-media class. “They consider themselves journalists, the public considers them journalists, sometimes they even get taxpayer money, i.e. NPR. They consider themselves journalists. I get no taxpayer money; I operate out of my parents’ basement, on an iMac, with my credit card, and I am held to a higher standard than the New York Times. It’s bullshit.”

Hyperbole aside, embedded in his rancor is a critique of the political and journalistic establishment worth taking seriously. (It’s the attached histrionics that tend to do him in: he wrote in early 2010 that he revealed “the massive corruption and fraud” at ACORN. The Massachusetts and California Attorneys General, the Brooklyn District Attorney and the US GAO all found a lack of corruption and fraud. This, for him, merely reaffirmed the extent of the corruption and fraud.)

Because his targets are well-known and already objects of political skirmishing — Planned Parenthood, ACORN, National Public Radio — O’Keefe believes the malfeasance he exposes will always be reflexively dismissed. To him, this is an example of a fundamental unfairness: O’Keefe sees that the New York Times can publish documents the White House would prefer it not, and “60 Minutes” can surreptitiously record video, yet when he has associates pose as potential Muslim donors to elicit revealing answers from NPR executives, O’Keefe is somehow the one who has committed a uniquely egregious infraction.

So, on account of being surrounded by what he sees as cultural enemies — the media, academia, the entertainment industry — O’Keefe’s position is that unorthodox tactics are morally mandatory. This journalistic model can sometimes come precariously close to transgressing ethical norms, he himself will admit. But in O’Keefe’s view, the norms themselves are wielded as tools of oppression. People must be made uncomfortable to be made aware.

Given his predilection for the outlandish — galavanting around in a pimp costume to advertise the ACORN videos, for example — it’s also easy to impugn the entire O’Keefe shtick as right-wing theater. “There’s very few journalists who really advance a certain truth, who push forward a new truth,” O’Keefe said. “It saddens me. Don’t say it’s my methodology. I mean, the ‘Jersey Shore’ and Jon Stewart and all these people are far more — when it comes right down to it — vulgar and silly than we will ever be. And they’re considered media darlings.”

A slight tremor of regret is detectable in his voice for bothering with the whole pimp-costume gimmick. He can expect to see that photo of himself smiling mischievously from an oversized fur coat every time his name is attached to something newsworthy. But this ongoing campaign of what he sees as character assassination, he said, is not a surprise. It comes with the territory he’s embraced ever since his days as an undergraduate at Rutgers University, when college administrators occupied the role of cultural enemy — well, where everything was an enemy, from the paper towel dispensers to the buses, as well as more traditional antagonists like politically correct language. That paper has since denounced him in its editorial pages. (O’Keefe, in his junior year, also did the impossible: he founded a campus publication, the exciting and sometimes enraging Rutgers Centurion, that energized the campus and was actually read.)

Q. Do you see any parallel between the way mainstream media has treated Julian Assange, and the way they’ve treated you. Because they will apply the same line of criticism to him.

A. I think he’s probably more admired than I am among the Hollywood crowd.

Q. I don’t think he’s more admired among the journalistic elite. I think they have a similar amount of disdain for him as they do with you. The irony being the two of you both release your primary sources, where they do not.

A. Yes. They don’t want to release their primary sources because they have to craft things in the right way, the correct way, the contextual way. ACORN — they’re poor people, they’re minority people, they’re products of a society that has disenfranchised them. It’s out of context to see them doing something inappropriate, so how dare you show that? How dare you show that? How could you hurt them? “Why would you do such a thing, James, to Planned Parenthood? Why would you do that? They’re just trying to help people.” That’s what they believe in their hearts.

“If we were to go after targets like the National Rifle Association or the National Republican Committee or something like that, I think I’d be considered a hero at Rutgers,” O’Keefe said. “But because we go after the subjects we do go after, like Planned Parenthood and ACORN and NPR, they don’t like me. Because a lot of these people — in the establishment, in the media, at universities — think these organizations do good work, and they’re good organizations. Therefore, why would you dare investigate a ‘good organization’? They even had someone at CNN say this to me a year or two ago, or three years ago. They said, ‘Why would you investigate Planned Parenthood? Why would you do that?’ My response is because they get taxpayer money. And they ought to be investigated like anything else that gets taxpayer money.”

If a fair-minded person of left-leaning tendencies, I responded, were shown evidence that employees of ACORN or Planned Parenthood had engaged in genuine wrongdoing, then I can’t imagine those fair-minded people would have any reservations about responding accordingly. But given the way the videos are edited and framed, how should they react to these tainted narratives?

“So you’re telling me that these lefty people don’t like what we do for our methodology?” O’Keefe asked. “Since when do lefties care about methodology? Give me a break. These people are all about outcomes. Outcomes: that’s what they don’t like. And when we start growing and targeting other organizations, I think that they’ll become more warm to it.”

(That made me wonder: if ethically dubious tactics were employed to bring about the resignation of, say, Donald Rumsfeld, or impelled Congress to investigate improprieties in the Chamber of Commerce, could we expect the same outcry that arose over ACORN?)

“I think all journalists have prejudice in their hearts,” O’Keefe said. “And bias. I think that the media is no longer really showing bias — they’re actually in the news suppression business. In other words, they go so far as to protect organizations that they like in their hearts.”

“And they’re political operatives, OK?” he said. “Which is funny, because that’s what they accuse of me of being. It’s really funny. Just like they accuse me of editing, when they edit everything they do. In fact, they get away with their narratives because they edit out things they don’t want people to see about organizations they like. And we show those things. So it’s one big testament — the whole truth behind what we do is, we’re compensating for what they haven’t done, and they don’t like that. Because they’ve intentionally not done it, OK? I’ve said this before, but all media consists basically either of pundits, that is people who express their opinion — Fox News is certainly made up of mostly pundits — and then there’s the stenographers, those people who write down what people tell them to publish.”

In comparison with journalists who insist that they are agenda-free — who insist their hearts have no role to play — O’Keefe views himself as a paragon of purity.

“I’m seeing an increase in these publications doing damage control for organizations that they like,” he said. “Let’s assume that there are a hundred James O’Keefes. The entire job of these organizations would be to highlight the pimp costume, scrutinize my editorial decisions, and so forth. They would cease to do journalism, because they’ve become consumed with criticizing me. And I don’t criticize other people. I just merely muckrake. I don’t criticize the editorial decisions of Mother Jones. I think it’s good when Rolling Stone magazine publishes a dossier on Goldman Sachs. God bless them; they’re doing good work. But I think it’s unethical, and I think it’s not journalism, to be focusing so much on us. What would you say to that?”

In this proposed new journalistic paradigm, I respond, if everyone is operating from the prejudices that they harbor deep in their hearts, then it really is about taking sides in a grander battle. If these publications are defending organizations that they “like,” that’s simply a function of their editorial outlook. And if you’re perceived as a political actor, then it makes perfect sense for them to attack you or to defend the organizations you target. Wouldn’t you embrace that?

“If I’m characterized as a political actor, it makes perfect sense for them to attack me?” O’Keefe asked.

Well, yes.

“Just take a look,” he said. “All these organizations do — when I was arrested my emails were leaked, assumedly by the government. And Mother Jones magazine teamed up with the government to leak my emails. I mean, it’s sick.”

(Such a claim deserves a response, so here’s Mother Jones co-editor Clara Jeffery: “We’ve written many stories about James O’Keefe, including some following his arrest for attempting to tamper with the phones of a US Senator, and several critical of the media passing along his ‘stings’ without vetting them, but none of our stories mentioned or were in any way based on his emails, which we have no access to. (In fact a search of our archives only reveal one story in which ‘James O’Keefe’ and ‘email’ appear, ‘The Age of the Policial Sting,’ by Kevin Drum. However the emails mentioned in that piece were the so-called Climategate emails, and to our knowledge O’Keefe had no role in their leakage.) Nor have we ever ‘teamed up’ with the US government in pursuit of a story. Anyone who was an actual journalist would know how preposterous a claim that is.”)

O’Keefe’s arrest took place in January, 2010, at a federal building in New Orleans.

Q. I think the hostility you encountered at Rutgers might be partially attributable to the fact that you target the organizations that you do, but it might be just as much related to their aversion to your methodology. Even if there was a “left” version of you doing the same type of thing, I think there’d be a comparable level of hostility.

A. Yeah, I don’t know though. I mean, the Governor Walker phone call — it didn’t really expose much, but [the prank caller] was considered a hero. No one resigned, there was no consequence to it, and it got like a thousand Google News articles. And everyone was talking about how heroic it was.

I think in the heart of every journalist — let’s think for a moment. I will say, and this shouldn’t be taken out of context, but why are we journalists? Well, that’s a sophisticated question. Maybe what we do is a form of something. Maybe it’s a new genre; maybe it’s not traditional journalism. It’s something new. It’s a combination of new mores and new methodologies. And it’s a tribute to what we do that with all the words in the English language, people can’t agree on what we’re supposed to be called.

But in every journalist’s heart is the belief — is a sort of prejudice towards whatever they’re prejudiced towards.

“How do you think it feels to be charged with a felony?” O’Keefe asked. “And framed by the media as being guilty, and having every exculpatory bit of evidence edited out of every article ever written about you? They edit out the fact that I showed my driver’s license at the door of the federal building in Louisiana. They edit out that the judge destroyed the videotape, so no context could be given as to my innocence. They edit that all out, because it doesn’t fit their predetermined narrative, while they accuse me of editing after I release my full tape. It’s totally bullshit. And I live with it everyday.”

His contention that mainstream news outlets could easily publish their primary sources on the Internet with greater frequency is a sensible one! This is something the New York Times has done in some cases, but still not so often.

“It’s the biggest sham in the world,” O’Keefe said. “Because it’s about how we get our information. It’s about how we get our information. Information that we make decisions about. Informed decisions. How can we make informed decisions when they edit out everything they don’t want us to see? People make informed decisions about James O’Keefe. ‘Oh, he’s a federal criminal, he’s a liar, he’s a dildo boat sex fiend.’ Well, they edit out the fact that I was cleared of a felony. And journalists to this day, if you follow me on Twitter, you’ll see all of these journalists getting it wrong. Why? Because they read Wikipedia. They read Wikipedia, edited by George Soros, who edits out my innocence pertaining to the felony.”

(Soros may not appear in the Wikipedia edits trail, that we know of, but earlier this month, Jimmy Wales himself made a small reversion of edits to O’Keefe’s Wikipedia page.)

“So you talk to me,” O’Keefe said, “and get to know me, and you’re like, “Oh, I didn’t know this James. I didn’t know that. I didn’t know that. Well now you know. Now you know that there are things about the world that they don’t want you to see. And it’s not about conservative, it’s not about liberal. It’s not about ‘Oh, your right wing agenda.’ If you get to know me, you’ll find I’m pretty neutral. I’m pretty neutral about how I view things. I’m pretty common sense. But we have to compensate. When the president of the free world is tied to [ACORN] and they refuse to investigate it, we have to investigate it. We’re called to investigate it. And things will balance out in the end. They always do. In terms of the press and the their credibility and our credibility. I think it’ll all work itself out.”

How can he fault the media for reporting the fact that he pled guilty to committing a crime on federal property?

“Entry by false pretenses,” he said. “Entering a federal office under false pretenses. I didn’t enter the building under false pretenses, because I showed my driver’s license at the door. So they charged me with this ridiculous statute, it’s called entry by false pretenses. Politicians and lobbyists enter their office under false pretenses everyday and get away with it. Think about that.”

But whatever the veracity of the charge, I ask, you still ended up pleading guilty to it. Correct?

“Yeah,” he says. “You’d plead guilty too, because you don’t have $500,000 to contest it.”

Can you fault the media for reporting the fact that you were convicted of that crime?

“For putting my mugshot on the front page of the New York Times within a few hours of me being arrested? And not covering the ACORN story at all? How am I more famous than ACORN if I’m famous for exposing ACORN? It doesn’t make any sense. Think about that. The New York Times did not assign a reporter to the ACORN story until after Congress and the senate voted to defund ACORN. Think about that for a second. The Congress of the United States voted on, and the president signed the bill into law, to defund ACORN prior to the New York Times assigning a reporter to the story. But I’m arrested and my mugshot makes the front page of the New York Times. Why?”

Because, I said, at the New York Times, as everywhere else, their ideas about news value stem from the deep human prejudices in their hearts, and they exercise a moral calculus in determining what the editorial —

“Now you understand,” he said, interrupting me. “As long as you admit that there is a deep-rooted prejudice in their hearts,” he said.

Of course, I said. That applies to everyone. More people should just admit it.

O’Keefe now oversees Project Veritas — a 501(c)3 under his tutelage that I’d describe as a Plastic Ono Band for young conservative activist-journalist provocateurs. They present themselves as the tragic few with enough temerity to challenge this giant web of deceit. They are determined to expose the web’s deep corruption, its disempowerment of average citizens, its shielding of powerful elites. As part of their practice, O’Keefe has offered himself up as the object of these elites’ contempt. It’s a narrative that would be similarly resonant on the populist left, if not for O’Keefe’s kowtowing to conservative dogmas. Which is odd — because O’Keefe isn’t the type of person who seems like he could get especially exercised over debt-ceilings or entitlement payouts. He is, however, aware that he has the potential for crossover appeal.

“Why is it that the people on the right ignore Wall Street, ignore the banks?” O’Keefe asked. “Why is it that people on the left ignore government?”

So why focus your ire on working-class Planned Parenthood employees, when defense contractors and corporate executives are the ones really swindling taxpayers by the billions?

“So again, ‘What about corporations?’” he said. “I’m just getting started, OK? We’ll get there. But I think that generally speaking, am I going to expose a Wall Street banker who sleeps with hookers? Eh, it depends how much TARP money he got.”

Michael Tracey writes for myriad publications, typically on matters of spiritual significance.

Early Drafts Of The First Part Of The Line “I’ve Had Sex Four Times This Week I’ll Explain/Having A Hard Time Adjusting To Fame…” From Drake’s New Song

1) I’ve had ice-cream four times this week
2) I’ve had diarrhea four times this week
3) I saw Something Borrowed in the theater twice
4) I’ve been wearing the same socks since Tuesday
5) I brushed my teeth with just water this morning
6) I clipped my toenails in the bed and I’m pretty sure I didn’t find all the parings when I tried to sweep them up
7) I watched both cases in an episode of “Judge Judy” yesterday while eating peanut butter and Nutella straight out of the jars with a spoon
8) The cat threw up on the couch and I just turned the cushion over
9) A piece of cheese fell down into the crack between the counter and the oven
10) I peed in the plant again
11) I was eating the peanut butter and Nutella with the same spoon, and some Nutella got mixed into the peanut-butter, I saw it there, but I closed the jar and put it back into the cabinet like that anyway