Patterico's Pontifications

2/25/2010

My $100 Offer to Eric Boehlert of Media Matters

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 7:49 am



I am offering Eric Boehlert of Media Matters the easiest $100 he ever made.

All he has to do to earn the $100: unequivocally state whether James O’Keefe pretended to be a pimp at ACORN offices. If Boehlert makes the statement publicly — with no weasel-words, no two-stepping, and no qualifications — I will PayPal him $100.

I made this offer to Boehlert on Twitter yesterday. He’s ignoring me. He even posted one Twitter message in which he said: “Leave me alone!”

Mr. Boehlert, I have you on the ropes. You think I am going to leave you alone? Have we met?

Here’s why Boehlert is ignoring me. He has spent days writing piece after piece about the Terribly Important Issue of whether James O’Keefe was dressed as a pimp at ACORN. But that is a red herring and he knows it. Because no matter how O’Keefe was dressed, he pretended to be a pimp at ACORN.

If Boehlert admits that, the trivial nature of his manufactured controversy over O’Keefe’s mode of dress will become painfully evident.

And if he wants to deny that O’Keefe posed as a pimp, let him do so clearly. And we’ll have that debate. I’d welcome it.

He won’t do either. And that’s why I feel perfectly confident that he will never act to collect the C-note I am offering — even though it would require nothing more than typing a simple 8-10 word sentence. For example, this sentence would earn Boehlert $100:

James O’Keefe did not pose as a pimp at ACORN.

That’s $10 a word! Or Boehlert could earn himself a picture of Ben Franklin with this sentence:

James O’Keefe posed as a pimp at ACORN.

That’s $12.50 a word. Does even George Soros pay that well? I ask you!

Boehlert wouldn’t even have to shave George Soros’s back!

P.S. If anyone wants to up the ante, tell me in the comments.

47 Responses to “My $100 Offer to Eric Boehlert of Media Matters”

  1. You win, Pat. It’s against the nature of weasels not to use weaselly language. You might as well ask them to fly up to the lowest tree branch by flapping their arms.

    L.N. Smithee (dcbd1a)

  2. If I make the statement publicly, will you PayPal me $100? 🙂

    The no weasel words Dana (3e4784)

  3. In early 2000, the U.S. Army received information that private contractors working at a base near Tuzla, Bosnia, were purchasing women from local brothels. Some of the women may have been as young as 12, and some were being held as sex slaves, the sources alleged.

    Investigations by the Bosnian police and the U.S. Army confirmed the gist of those reports, turning up significant evidence of wrongdoing by at least seven men — including at least one supervisor — employed by Reston, Va.-based DynCorp. Despite those findings, no one ever faced criminal charges or prosecution in either Bosnia or the United States.

    The investigation at Camp Comanche in Bosnia is at the heart of a lawsuit filed by former DynCorp mechanic Ben Johnston, who says DynCorp wrongfully fired him for assisting the Army Criminal Investigation Command in its probe of the camp. The investigation and its results, along with allegations made in a similar whistleblower lawsuit against DynCorp in the U.K., have brought to light a critical loophole in efforts to police the shadowy world of private military firms, a booming industry that’s now worth almost $100 billion a year.

    Thanks to a combination of factors — the jurisdictional conflicts of American law, the immunity provided to these contractors by international treaties, and the underdeveloped police agencies in host countries — many crimes committed by private military personnel while based overseas will likely go unpunished, just as they did in Bosnia.

    “You have a situation where employees of these companies can commit serious crimes and the only enforcement we have against them is the law of the marketplace,” says Peter W. Singer, an Olin fellow at the Brookings Institution, who has studied the companies for seven years. “That’s proven to be insufficient.”

    http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2002/06/27/military/print.html

    Amount of money received by DynCorp’s parent company from feds in FY 2008: $1.9 billion

    Amount of money received by ACORN from feds since 1994: $53 million

    Great priorities guys.

    AJB (3008d4)

  4. I’ll add $10 to the $100.

    Old Coot (9e58d8)

  5. O’Keefe posed as a pimp, just as Hanna Giles posed as a whore, but since ACORN is full of pimps and whores both seeking and providing ACORN’s assistance, none of the employees saw anything but business as usual.

    ropelight (14aeb7)

  6. AJB, Liberal Cultist fed by Media Doesn’t Matters.

    PCD (1d8b6d)

  7. Wait, do you hear that sound? It’s the sound of thousands of mouth – breathing, trampling Trolls, furiously heeding the sound of their master’s dog whistle! Here they come! One…two…three…

    Dmac (799abd)

  8. Whether O’Keefe wore a pimp suit matters and is certainly not a red herring. There’s a huge difference between “posing” as a pimp while dressed as a conservative college student and “posing” as a pimp dressed as a stereotypical pimp, since ACORN’s reactions to him may have been completely different in both situations. If it’s such a red herring then he and others wouldn’t have gone to such lengths to mislead the public into thinking he was dressed that way, including going on Fox News and sitting right next to an anchor who claimed as such. O’Keefe and Breitbart have been vigorously going after any news outlet to print corrections on the slightest errors that made O’Keefe look bad, so why did they turn a blind eye to the hundreds of incidents of news outlets claiming O’Keefe had gone into ACORN “dressed” as a stereotypical pimp?

    Boehlert or any other person who wasn’t in the ACORN offices can’t claim definitively at what lengths O’Keefe went to pose as a pimp, so trying to trap him in a “gotcha” question misses the point, which is that O’Keefe has proven himself an unreliable narrator at best and an outright liar at worst. Boehlert and Friedman are calling for the unedited tapes to be released because O’Keefe has proven that his extreme editing cannot be trusted, especially since we have to rely on his voiceover narration while watching the videos to even know what’s supposedly going on.

    By saying definitively that O’Keefe hadn’t posed as a pimp, Boehlert would simply be repeating the same mistakes of traditional news outlets who fell for the deception hook, line, and sinker that O’Keefe had dressed as a pimp. He can’t say for sure because he doesn’t know, just like everyone else but O’Keefe and the other people present in those ACORN offices.

    Simon Owens (46f25b)

  9. Dmac: You nailed it; example is the very next comment.

    Old Coot (9e58d8)

  10. Boehlert or any other person who wasn’t in the ACORN offices can’t claim definitively at what lengths O’Keefe went to pose as a pimp

    Troll Tactic #14 – Rewrite the question to suit you.

    Nobody is asking Boehlert to opine about “what lengths” O’Keefe went to to pose as a pimp, just whether he did pose as one or not. It’s a simple binary question, so naturally the left is resorting to their “nuance” playbook and invoking shades of grey.

    Subotai (bda015)

  11. Great priorities guys.

    Comment by AJB — 2/25/2010 @ 8:23 am

    It would have saved a lot of time and space if you had just typed “Look! A squirrel!”

    Nice try.

    L.N. Smithee (d1de1b)

  12. O’Keefe and Breitbart have been vigorously going after any news outlet to print corrections on the slightest errors that made O’Keefe look bad

    Yeah, slight errors such as – “O’Keefe was arrested for wire-tapping”. And “O’Keefe organized a racist conference”. And “O’Keefe said he went after ACORN because it’s full of black people”. Trival errors like that. Darn O’Keefe and Breitbart for being so nit-picky about such “slight errors”!

    Subotai (bda015)

  13. I think we can bump up the payment per word. He should just answer the following question: Did James O’Keefe pose as a pimp at Acorn? “Yes” wins him $100 and “No” wins him $100 without all of the need for nuanced explanations.

    Rochf (ae9c58)

  14. Boehlert and Friedman are calling for the unedited tapes to be released because O’Keefe has proven that his extreme editing cannot be trusted

    Comment by Simon Owens — 2/25/2010 @ 8:47 am

    NOBODY from Media Matters For America or the leftweb in general deserves benefit of the doubt over O’Keefe when it comes to “extreme editing.”

    L.N. Smithee (d1de1b)

  15. RELEASE THE F’NG TAPES OR THE WORLD WILL DIE!!!!!

    daleyrocks (718861)

  16. Save the whales, release the tapes!

    daleyrocks (718861)

  17. Considering the way Hanna Giles was dressed, the guy she was with must have been a pimp, or the former Democrat governor of New York.

    ropelight (14aeb7)

  18. How does a pimp dress anyhow?

    Maybe AJB can tell us how his boss dresses?

    Vivictius (1720ac)

  19. Patterico, can I get $100 if I front-page an unequivocal statement about whether O’Keefe posed as a pimp at the ACORN offices?

    D. Aristophanes (d68d56)

  20. Patterico, can I get $100 if I front-page an unequivocal statement about whether O’Keefe posed as a pimp at the ACORN offices?
    Comment by D. Aristophanes — 2/25/2010 @ 9:51 am

    See? I bet you’re not wearing a prostitute costume right now, but you’re still able to solicit. Nice to know the going rate in your neck of the woods though, thanks.

    Stashiu3 (44da70)

  21. Stashiu3 – all I am asking is for Patterico to leave the $100 on the bedside table.

    D. Aristophanes (d68d56)

  22. Well-played. 😉

    Stashiu3 (44da70)

  23. “That’s $12.50 a word. Does even George Soros pay that well? I ask you!”

    hahahahahahaha

    Dustin (b54cdc)

  24. What is Boehlert’s argument, that it is standard procedure to abet an alleged criminal act, because
    that was how ACORN acted, which is not surprising
    considering their track record

    ian cormac (9575ac)

  25. Whether O’Keefe wore a pimp suit matters and is certainly not a red herring.

    Here, doggie! Here, boy! Down, down, I say! How about a treat? Would you like that? Who’s a good boy? Who’s a good boy? You are!

    Dmac (799abd)

  26. D. Aristophanes,

    I offer you $1.39.

    Patterico (1e7e95)

  27. That is about a buck more than darisophistry is worth.

    JD (b537f4)

  28. “D. Aristophanes,

    I offer you $1.39.

    Comment by Patterico — 2/25/2010 @ 1:00 pm”

    How do you know he’s had his shots?

    daleyrocks (718861)

  29. You can tell if he’s had his shots if his mouth doesn’t start foaming when he tries to speak.

    Dmac (799abd)

  30. Oops. Apparently it has not had its shots yet.

    JD (b537f4)

  31. JD and Dmac—STOP. You both owe me a new screen and keyboard. I just spewed cola all over mine.

    peedoffamerican (2478c9)

  32. “… were purchasing women from local brothels…”

    If there were brothels in the area, then we must assume the prostitution was legal, or at least tolerated; and who are we to impose our stulted vision of morality on indigenous peoples?
    That would be being judgemental.

    AD - RtR/OS! (116c8a)

  33. I don’t quite get it. O’Keefe and everyone else in the circus surrounding his tapes made a huge deal about how outrageously he was dressed. And that’s entirely relevant and not trivial: the whole case was that the ACORN employees were knowingly aiding and abetting an abusive pimp. Most of right made a big fuss about it: turning around and calling it trivial when it turns out to be not only false, but deliberately false, is pathetic.

    And there’s a BIG difference in just how stupid or defensible the actions of the few ACORN employees that did something questionable depending on who they thought O’Keefe was. Because, as some of the transcripts suggest, at least some of the ACORN folks thought O’Keefe was a concerned boyfriend of a prostitute who was looking to get AWAY from an abusive pimp. That’s a radically different story than the one Breitbart and O’Keefe originally told with their highly edited videotapes. And while it still doesn’t make the actions of the most egregious employees okay, it certainly is far more understandable that they’d want to help Giles.

    Again, you can claim all these things are trivial, but given how important those details were to how supposedly juicy and outrageous the original claims were, I’d call that a big bowl of cop out.

    Drew (764b5e)

  34. I don’t quite get it. O’Keefe and everyone else in the circus surrounding his tapes made a huge deal about how outrageously he was dressed.

    Not only do you not quite get it, you don’t even slightly get it. There was no “huge deal” about how O’Keefe was dressed. That’s a red-herring thrown out by ACORNS’s defenders.

    Subotai (bda015)

  35. Why not link to Boehlert?

    Here’s the first graph from Feb 23rd:
    http://mediamatters.org/columns/201002230024

    “Last September 12, when the story of undercover ACORN surveillance videos was just breaking, conservative activist Hannah Giles, who starred in the clips as a wannabe prostitute, appeared on Fox News. Host Greg Gutfeld was positively giddy during his Giles interview, as he mocked the ACORN employees who were caught on tape giving Giles and her undercover partner, James O’Keefe, all kinds of misguided advice on how a prostitute could pay* taxes on her late-night income.”
    and later:
    “Last week, when highlighting how the pimp story was a fake, I stressed two things. First, that fact does not change what happened on the Candid Camera tapes, and it certainly doesn’t excuse the behavior of the low-level ACORN staffers who seemed shockingly eager to help people skirt the law.”

    You’re so full of sh-t your eyes are brown.

    Calvino (f77662)

  36. I see we have a new batch of trolls that are spitting out the exact same BS that the last batch did. Drew and Calvino are good little sycophantic foot soldiers.

    JD (b537f4)

  37. Patterico, I’m in for $20. I believe that brings it to $130.

    Ben (12938d)

  38. I’ll add $35, if it will tempt the fellow out of his girlie-man cave.

    GeneralMalaise (c58b20)

  39. I watched every video.

    I never saw, or even suspected, that O’Keefe was wearing anything that could be described as a “pimp suit” while he was in the ACORN offices.

    He appears at the beginning and end in the ridiculous clothes, but it was obvious (to me) at any rate that he wasn’t wearing them in the offices.

    But it was also obvious that he was 1) acting as pimp to the supposed prostitute; and 2) trying to establish a brothel full of under-aged girls; and 3) ACORN folks were pretty happy to oblige him.

    It’s just indisputable. He posed as a pimp, didn’t wear the pimp-suit, and ACORN was fine with the whole thing.

    Anything else is just a deliberate distraction.

    Pious Agnostic (b2c3ab)

  40. “Last week, when highlighting how the pimp story was a fake, I stressed two things. First, that fact does not change what happened on the Candid Camera tapes, and it certainly doesn’t excuse the behavior of the low-level ACORN staffers who seemed shockingly eager to help people skirt the law.”

    He dd not highlight “how the pimp story was a fake”. He got very excited about how O’Keefe was dressed, whcih has next to nothing to do with the pimp story.

    And he did not “stress” the things he says he stressed. He mentioned them in a single brief paragraph buried in the middle a very long post. Here he goes.

    And no, by pointing out the holes in the ACORN sting story, I’m not trying to excuse what was captured (illegally?) on tape. Everyone knows the embarrassing mistakes the poorly trained, low-level ACORN employees made when dealing with O’Keefe and Giles. That situation, and the continued fallout surrounding it, is for the organization to deal with.

    Sounds more like “minimizing” than “stressing” to me.

    Subotai (bda015)

  41. O’Keefe and everyone else in the circus surrounding his tapes made a huge deal about how outrageously he was dressed.

    Then how about citing one objective source, rather than the usual Trollbot’s use of hackneyed sources like those from George Soros’s asspull operation? What’s next from your awesome arsenal of truth, something from FireDogLake?

    You’re so full of sh-t your eyes are brown.

    Awwww, now you’re all upset, huh, Twinkie? Must be quite difficult to realize that you’re not only losing the argument, the argument’s been over for many months now.

    Dmac (799abd)

  42. The single, damn funniest thing EVER written by an internet commenter since “I am aware of all internet traditions” was just uttered and the partisan hacks on this thread are so intent on getting to each they missed it:

    . …are good little sycophantic foot soldiers.

    Comment by JD — 2/25/2010

    Once he hit submit, for just an instant, all the collective irony in the Universe was channeled to this thread. Who knows how many hilarious post-modern mimes and improv comics died on stage in that instant when jdizzle sucked (and I mean sucked) all the irony from the Universe. The Gods of Comedy roared their laughter and muttered about how little self-awareness Patterico’s Salacious B. Crumb has.

    I tells you, as entertaining as this bit of bullshit of a 50th O’Keefe posting is, nothing, NOTHING could have made my day as reading a “grown” man call a funnier man “darisophistry” and then utter the most ironic comment ever! (why don’t you come over to Sadly, No, jd? You know, take him on?)

    For a long time, I couldn’t figure out why Patterico wanted to be O’Keefe’s defender, Giles’s knight in shinging armor, and Andy’s pal so much he was willing to hammer at it day after day. Now, I realize it’s because Patterico’s a masterful performance artist…..getting one of the gibbons to utter that phrase!? Jesus, Patterico’s a genius of the genre.

    Oh, by the way, O’Keefe spliced that footage in to fool you folks and his viewer. He went on Fox wearing a damn chinchilla coat and told the Washington Post he borrowed his grandpa’s hat, etc. It wasn’t to fool ACORN (they’re too diabolical to fool so easily). It was to fool you guys. He has nothing but contempt for you with his Alinsky-ite tactics.

    And, you ate it up, and, when his dishonesty is called, you guys defend him. He’s a pimp alright and, unfortunately, you’re his ho’s.

    timb (8f04c0)

  43. I don’t know, why doesn’t sombody LOOK?

    http://tinyurl.com/yatn752

    Lazarus Long (a4f63e)

  44. I don’t know, why doesn’t sombody LOOK?

    http://tinyurl.com/yatn752

    Lazarus Long (a4f63e)

  45. […] knows O’Keefe posed as a pimp. But he won’t say so. I have offered to give Boehlert $100 (commenters have bumped the offer to $200) simply to state clearly whether O’Keefe pretended […]

    Patterico's Pontifications » Boehlert Lies Again (e4ab32)

  46. […] have challenged Boehlert to say clearly whether O’Keefe ever posed as a pimp at ACORN. The offer stands at $200 simply to […]

    » Debunking Some Emerging ACORN Liberal Myths - Big Journalism (d59464)

  47. […] have challenged Boehlert to say clearly whether O’Keefe ever posed as a pimp at ACORN. The offer stands at $200 simply […]

    Patterico's Pontifications » Debunking Some Emerging ACORN Liberal Myths (e4ab32)


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