Tag Archives: The New Yorker

James O’Keefe is Just a Clown Now

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Illustration by Mike McQuade; Source: Chip Somodevilla / Getty (man)

New Orleans    I’m tired of hearing anything about James O’Keefe, the discredited video scammer, whose one infamous claim to notoriety was his heavily edited attack on ACORN in 2009 in concert with conservative pundits and Congressional representatives. Luckily, I’m now in the vast majority as one escapade after another further exposes him as nothing more than an unethical, unscrupulous jerk. Even better than being little more than a boring footnote of these dark times, we can all find some joy in the fact that increasingly he is nothing more than an embarrassment to the conservative cause and a source of ridicule as the poster boy for sheer incompetence.

None of us can forget the Keystone Kops affair at former US Senator Mary Landrieu’s field office in New Orleans, where he and his co-conspirators were caught monkeying with the phones in a ridiculous effort to try and prove her office was not answer the phone about the Affordable Care Act. Huh?!? Well, they got off without having to do time on a felony beef for breaking-and-entering, and eventually pled out and outlasted his probation, but wow….what a bunch of boneheads.

He and his flub-a-dub crew have had one blunder after another to their credit from ACORN on. They stumbled around Texas looking for some evidence of mischief in Obamacare signups and were chased out of the Local 100 office in Dallas when busted. They bought a Hillary t-shirt with cash and claimed it was dirty money. Small potatoes. Thin soup. No one’s eating any more.

The latest from the O’Keefe gang that can’t shoot straight was some kind of attempted sting they were planning on George Soros’ Open Society Foundation. Supposedly they were trying to make a point about how groups are networked or something, but god only knows.

Anyway, according to reports in The New Yorker and on the Media Matters website, they were trying to set up their operation claiming some Hungarian émigré wanted to work with them, as if that’s the way OSI operates. They had someone with a British accent who was going to pretend to be Hungarian. The whole scene already sounds unbelievably bizarre.

As they reported:

Conservative media darling James O’Keefe accidentally detailed his plans to infiltrate and smear progressive organizations on the voicemail of Dana Geraghty, an employee of liberal philanthropist George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, continuing a string of embarrassing missteps in his attempts at undercover stings. After leaving Geraghty a voicemail claiming to be “Victor Kesh,” a “Hungarian-American who represents a, uh, foundation,” O’Keefe held “a meeting about how to perpetrate an elaborate sting on Soros,” unaware that his phone was still connected to Geraghty’s voicemail. During the call, O’Keefe outlined plans to send an “undercover” operative posing as a potential donor to the foundation in a project he named “Discover the Networks.” O’Keefe’s plot involved using an English orthopedic surgeon with “a real heavy British accent” to secretly film Soros-linked progressive organizations. He later admitted that “some of us just forget to hang up the phone. The New Yorker continued:

 

The accidental recording reached farcical proportions when Kesh announced that he was opening Geraghty’s LinkedIn page on his computer. He planned to check her résumé and leverage the information to penetrate the Soros “octopus.” Kesh said, “She’s probably going to call me back, and if she doesn’t I can create other points of entry.” Suddenly, Kesh realized that by opening Geraghty’s LinkedIn page he had accidentally revealed his own LinkedIn identity to her. (LinkedIn can let users see who has looked at their pages.) “Whoa!” an accomplice warned. “Log out!” The men anxiously reassured one another that no one checks their LinkedIn account anyway. “It was a little chilling to hear this group of men talking about me as a ‘point of entry,’ ” Geraghty says. “But—not to sound ageist—it was clear that these people were not used to the technology.”

I mean, really, need I say more?

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The Vietnam War Nightmares Continue

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Pham Thanh Cong, the director of the My Lai Museum, was eleven at the time of the massacre. His mother and four siblings died. “We forgive, but we do not forget,” he said.Credit Photograph by Katie Orlinsky

Pham Thanh Cong, the director of the My Lai Museum, was eleven at the time of the massacre. His mother and four siblings died. “We forgive, but we do not forget,” he said. Credit Photograph by Katie Orlinsky

New Orleans       So many wars, so little time.   We have come to the point where when someone asks an American “about the war,” we have to say, “Which one?”   One of the two Iraq wars?  Afghanistan and its continuing and unending conflicts?  Like I said, which one?  For people of a certain age though the answer continues to be Vietnam and its fifty year nightmares that persist for many people.

Reading a piece by Seymour Hersh, one of the great reporters and war correspondents of our time in The New Yorker, called “The Scene of the Crime” brings the horror back quickly.  Hersh’s piece is both a reflection on his own history in covering the My Lai massacre and a contemporary revisiting and recording of a deeper understanding of the mess and mayhem that marked that horrible war.  The body count, like so much about Vietnam, continues to be uncertain but a small platoon of US soldiers killed between 347 and 504.

In 2010, the Organizers’ Forum visited with a delegation of US and Canadian organizers both Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon).  We talked to a lot of people.  We visited the tunnels outside of Ho Chi Minh City, listened to the gunfire, and the guides’ description of the struggle “underground.”  We visited the Museum of the War of Liberation in Hanoi.  There was no way to escape the US role and our historical footprint in the country.

At the same time, reading Hersh about My Lai and its aftermath still shocks, especially when it now seems that such massacres were commonplace rather than unique.  How had I managed to suppress the fact that President Nixon had commuted Lieutenant Calley’s sentence after 90 days?  How had he managed to work for decades at his father-in-law’s jewelry store in small town Georgia?  There must be novelists out there that could write book after book about how that might have worked out?  Richard Ford, what are you working on now?  There’s a classic waiting to be written about the small town South and its ability to hold and protect its own – no matter what! – that is Faulknerian.   The imagination just blows up at the thought of it all!

Hersh interviews Chuck Searcy.  The Organizer’s Forum had met with Searcy to find out more about the nonprofit he helps coordinate that focuses on mine clearance through the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund.  Hersh obviously pulled more of his personal story out and the conflict with conscience, family, and the whole burden that so many veteran packed out.  We found him a very decent man.  He had paid  his dues.

With Hilary Clinton announcing for President we will hear the narrative that harkens back to the old culture wars that involved Vietnam, long hair, drugs, liberation, and rock and roll, rather than the new culture wars of new wars, abortion, guns, and the rest of it.  Reading Hersh on My Lai and Vietnam again it is hard to avoid the feeling that rather than embracing some kind of resolution and reconciliation like South Africa and other countries have done from their time of troubles, we have simply repressed it all and hoped that no one reminds us.

Perhaps that is why we have also seem to have learned so little and repeated the same mistakes so often.

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