How much does a congressman cost?
It may well be past time for James O’Keefe to take his hidden cameras to the halls of Congress. Or, more precisely, he should take them into Congressional offices to find out how much influence he can purchase there.
James O’Keefe is a practitioner of sting journalism, a style of information gathering that blue blooded, communications school educated and therefore, pristinely ethical journalists disdain, unless it’s
a blogger pretending to be billionaire conservative activist David Koch calling Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, or
ABC News running sting operations on ordinary Americans, or CBS’s 60 Minutes every Sunday, or... You get the picture.
It’s one of those situational ethics things. And it’s very common in journalism. It’s the sort of thing that requires a degree in journalism to distinguish from bias.
Every real journalist knows where the ethical line is, even if the rest of us don’t have a clue, unless it has something to do with ideology, which couldn’t be. Because everyone knows that the journalism profession is above ideology and can be trusted to deliver unbiased facts. That’s one of the things that sets them above us – and far above James O’Keefe.
And it permits James O’Keefe access to the low hanging fruit that real journalists elect to leave unpicked.
And because his methods, or perhaps his results, are so distasteful to the journalistic elite, consumers of news from traditional news media might not have heard that James O’Keefe
snared high level National Public Radio executives schmoozing with undercover journalists pretending to represent a fictitious Muslim Brotherhood front group, the Muslim Education Action Center. O’Keefe’s actors offered NPR $5 million in exchange for more sympathetic coverage of the Palestinian cause.
The NPR executives were clearly eager to make the deal. And to prove their devotion to the Muslim Brotherhood’s cause, they enthusiastically indulged themselves in a little anti-Semitism.
Ron Schiller explained to his guests that
“Jews own the newspapers,” but not NPR. His fellow NPR fundraiser, Betsey Liley, volunteered no dissent from his statements, and even speculated on how NPR could hide the donation from federal auditors. In addition, Schiller nodded his agreement with the actors’ complaint that, “Jews do kind of control the media,” and that they would like to see, “less Jew influence on NPR.”
The release of the video forced the resignations of both NPR executives involved in the meeting and culminated in the dismissal of NPR President and CEO, Vivian Schiller.
One wonders what editorial influence George Soros purchased with his recent $1.8 million donation to NPR and what sort of discussions attended that gift, although he would hardly have to pay NPR to disseminate his ideology. They’re pretty much on the same page already.
But even though there is not yet a video of similar interactions between certain members of Congress and the Muslim Brotherhood, recent testimony suggests that a similar sting opportunity is ripening on Capital Hill. The Daily Caller, an online magazine and news aggregator site created by Andrew Breitbart, discovered an
eerie similarity between Democratic criticisms of Congressman Peter King (R-NY) and talking points issued by the Muslim Political Affairs Council, a domestic group very closely affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, and not James O’Keefe.
The similarities are so striking that the Democrats’ rhetorical flourishes might qualify as plagiarism if discovered in a college term paper.
First, the MPAC accused King of, “pure political posturing,” a criticism then repeated word for word by Representative Laura Richardson (D-CA).
And after the MPAC expressed the ironic concern that these hearings would “hurt national security,” Representative Al Green (D-Texas) said the same thing and even gave the same reason - because of the hearing’s “narrow scope.”
Someone should have asked him how much home grown Hindu terrorism has threatened the US lately.
Representative Keith Ellison (D-MN) scrolled right down the MPAC’s list, scarcely altering a word. He most certainly would have found himself before a disciplinary board if he had tried to pass that off as his own work in college.
Which makes one wonder – just how much does the Muslim Brotherhood have to pay for the privilege of puppeteering congressmen in Washington? NPR’s Ron Schiller and Betsey Liley at least had the decency to place a $5 million price tag on their ethics. Do these congressmen’s principles come with a price tag in the range of NPR fundraisers, or are they simply useful idiots?
The journalist did allow that the White House has a perception problem, but continued to defend the President being out of the country: "Even though he's with his daughters and they get very little time off. He's down in South America, three country tour, doing all of the official business."
