A success rate of 1 is 1 too many. Several people were fired. Management accepted the evidence that you find unacceptable. That's all that matters. Management saw through the lies that some employees tried-"I was just playing along". You bought into those lies and have come up with bizarre fantasies to try to support them.
Corrupt employees fired, and intense scrutiny on a corrupt organization. Mission accomplished.
Fired employees mean the entire organization is corrupt? By what measure? How come there has been no indictments in any of the places?
I don't usually get involved in these political threads, but the people defending O'Keefe here are simply wrong.
Can you at least accept that the tapes are "
heavily edited" and misleading? Then consider O'Keefe has
not released unedited video, and its been nearly six months. On the other hand, this is what he released:
1) Video of ACORN, Balitmore
ACORN workers caught on tape allegedly advising on prostitution
CNN.com
updated 10:21 a.m. EDT, Fri September 11, 2009
...
The video footage -- which has been
edited and
goes to black in some areas -- was recorded and posted online Thursday by James O'Keefe, a conservative activist. He was joined on the video by another conservative, Hannah Giles, who posed as the prostitute in the filmmakers' undercover sting.
...
2) Video of ACORN, Philadelphia
Video makers release tape of Philly ACORN visit
Thursday October 22 2009
Associated Press
...
The Philadelphia visit is significant because of a dispute over statements ACORN has made defending what took place when Giles and O'Keefe visited the Philadelphia office last summer.
Supporters of O'Keefe and Giles said ACORN has lied about whether the two were thrown out of the Philadelphia office, how much time they spent there and whether they explicitly told ACORN workers that Giles was a prostitute.
...
"At no point were we kicked out, at no time were we asked to leave," O'Keefe says on the tape of the Philadelphia visit.
Neil Herrmann, ACORN's lead organizer in Philadelphia, was quoted in news accounts last month as saying that an employee at the office had asked O'Keefe and Giles to leave. On the edited tape released Wednesday, the couple were not asked to leave.
...
In the video,
the voice of the ACORN employee was muted for legal reasons. ACORN is suing O'Keefe and Giles and conservative columnist Andrew Breithart, who posted the videos on his Web site.
So O'Keefe released video that is "
highly edited, trimmed to roughly 8 minutes from about 30 minutes of footage" and muted the audio then claimed ACORN "lied."
This video was his crowning achievement to prove ACORN was corrupt and lying!
In reality even ACORN critic Greta Van Susteren, a Fox "News" host,
said the tape looked "doctored," didn't think O'Keefe "got the goods to say that ACORN lied."
3) Video of ACORN, Los Angeles
O'Keefe released this video in November, despite releasing the earlier videos in September. The reason is
very clear:
In making public a video he withheld for more than two months, right-wing activist James O'Keefe finally acknowledged that a 'Los Angeles ACORN employee "would not assist us obtain a house for our illegal activities."
4) Video of ACORN, San Diego
Scott Harshbarger, a former Massachusetts attorney general,
investigated and reported (link to the WaPo mention of the report):
"the broadcast versions were edited and voiced over in ways that distorted the actual encounters between Giles and O'Keefe and the duped ACORN personnel." In the San Diego case the employee shown on the tapes speaks Spanish, not English. Harshbarger notes that "in the released video, his participation amounts mostly to nodding or saying 'OK.' It is difficult to determine what this employee is responding to because the videographers' statements are obscured by a voiceover inserted later."
5) Video of ACORN, San Bernardino
The ACORN staffer realizes its a joke, and decides to play along:
Blowback in the ACORN Wars
ABC News
September 16, 2009 10:15 AM
...
ACORN officials have fired some of the employees in question, while also suggesting the videotapes are not precisely what they seem. The most recent video --
from a San Bernardino ACORN office -- depicts an ACORN employee claiming to have murdered her husband.
But when the Press-Enterprise newspaper caught up with ACORN employee Tresa Kaelke, she told the newspaper she was messing with the filmmakers and making it all up.
"They were clearly playing with me," she said "I decided to shock them as much as they were shocking me."
Reports the newspaper: "Since she claimed on the video to have killed her husband, two San Bernardino police homicide detectives interviewed her at the office Tuesday. Police said they have been in contact with Kaelke's former husbands and the homicide claims do not appear accurate.
...
O'Keefe and his pals at Fox News then used this comment as "proof" that ACORN hires murders, not realizing they'd be had and that statement was false.
6) Lastly, an overall statement about the tapes:
ACORN foe's second act: Few reported that James O'Keefe's attack turned out to be legal gossamer
Sunday, January 31st 2010, 4:00 AM
By Errol Louis
New York Daily News
...
Only a few news outlets have noted that O'Keefe did not wear the outlandish pimp outfit into every ACORN office; in some cases, he spliced footage of himself into the finished product to make it look that way. And of course, neither O'Keefe nor his boss, conservative media entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart of BigGovernment.com, has ever released the full, unedited videos.
...
O'Keefe's ACORN tapes are not in reality what some people have been saying they are. Mix that with O'Keefe likely violated recording laws in two states (PA and MD), is accused of committing a felony in New Orleans, has
admitted attending a racist event, and his former faculty sponsor for his college newspaper
questioned O'Keefe's intergrity, I don't see why people are defending this guy.
If O'Keefe wants to be a journalist then he should do what journalists do. Release full un-edited tapes to neutral parties. Instead he cut audio, splice in clips of out context, and slowly leaked the tapes over three months. Then months later went into a Senator's office to tamper with her phone. Hardly a journalist or even a respectable person.
If O'Keefe has evidence of "corruption" and won't release the full tapes, that also shows a lack of morality. Especially, since there have been no legal charges against ACORN or any staffer at ACORN.
