Update: Mike Stark has a video where Andrew Breitbart claims that he never knew that O’Keefe didn’t wear the ridiculous pimp costume into the ACORN offices. I’m skeptical.
I’m sort of amazed, right along with Joan Walsh, that the wingnutteria lack so much self-awareness that they think that screaming and throwing a tantrum and almost breaking down is a “rational” response from Andrew Breitbart, who is losing his shit rapidly as the stunt he helped pull with James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles against ACORN is being exposed as mostly bullshit and not a little bit racist. They think it’s self-evident that a conservative white guy should get to do whatever he wants; behaving yourself is for the undeserving—-women, non-white people, liberals. Screeching and freaking out is “rational”.....if you’re a conservative white guy. It’s tautological. The word “rational” means “conservative white guy” in their book, so everything they do is “rational”, even if they’re Glenn Beck lying and crying on camera.
It figures. The same people who think this “rap” video is the bee’s knees can’t be expected to engage with reality, or dictionary definitions of the word “rational”.
The justification for Breitbart’s “kicking ass” like “John Wayne” (seriously, this is the commenters at his site’s own words) is that meanie liberals called him a racist. Quoting Joan Walsh:
The crux of Marcus’s argument is that Breitbart’s hysteria is justified, because in Breitbart’s words, “The worst thing you can do ...in politically correct America…is accuse somebody of being a (sic) racism.”
Fine, Andrew. If it’s just a matter of one little word, I’ll happily agree to switch to Pam’s wonderful replacement term “color-arousal”. Let’s just say that James O’Keefe seems to be in a constant state of color-arousal:
Blumenthal’s Salon article detailed O’Keefe’s involvement in a white nationalist debate featuring American Renaissance’s Jared Taylor (we corrected the article to take out the charge that O’Keefe helped organize the event). Blumenthal and the New York Times and others have written about O’Keefe’s racially tinged pranks at Rutgers, where he organized a spoof “affirmative action bake sale” (where minorities got discounts) and protested the cafeteria carrying “Lucky Charms” cereal because it belittled Irish Americans. Then there’s that silly pimp stunt, with a fur coated costume borrowed straight from blaxploitation movies. It’s fair to raise questions about O’Keefe (and Breitbart’s) racial attitudes.
Don’t forget another piece of evidence to add to the overall puzzle: Hannah Giles uses terms like “thug organization” to describe ACORN. Why are they “thugs”, Hannah? Is it because they aggressively fill out those tax forms for their clients? Is it because they organize for better housing with brickbats? Do the voter registration drives run by ACORN all start off with a rousing chorus of “When You’re A Jet”?
And that was Pam’s point. If conservatives are going to say that the word “racist” is so bad that openly racist behavior can’t be called “racist”, then we’ll just have to use another term. Because what they’re trying to do with this emotional freak-out is shut down discussions they can’t win, and they can’t win them because they know they’re in the wrong. I’m personally unimpressed by conservative white guys and their female support staff claiming that labeling behavior is so wrong that it can’t be done no matter how accurate the label. If it hurts your feelings to be called a liar and a racist, maybe you should reconsider being a liar or a racist—-or you could just own it. But wanting the space to perform the behaviors without anyone acknowledging what you do? Since when is that a right?
Joan notes that there are indeed things worse than being called a racist: