You'll recall when the ACORN pimp hoax unraveled earlier this year, Breitbart suddenly claimed ignorance. Despite the fact that he'd used his Washington Times column in 2009 to push the phony pimp angle hard, this winter Breitbart wanted everyone to know he actually had no idea what was on the heavily-edited ACORN tapes and that James O'Keefe had mislead him into thinking he'd walked into ACORN offices dressed as a pimp. So despite the fact that Breitbart had championed the ACORN tapes for months and personally vouched for their contents (he'd told "the truth"), when the hoax crumbled Breitbart changed his tune and claimed he didn't know what was on the discredited ACORN tapes because, oops, he'd been duped.
I'm guessing we're going to see a replay, now that Breitbart's one-day-old NAACP gotcha video has already been revealed as bogus. Meaning, in his presentation of a heavily-edited video featuring Shirley Sherrod, then-USDA Georgia Director of Rural Development and a speech she gave at an NAACP event this year, Breitbart claimed the story she told about helping a "white farmer" reflected her "federal duties" as an Obama administration official.
But as Media Matters noted today, that's false, which means the entire premise of the gotcha video is false. (The "white farmer" story took place nearly two decades ago.)
So, I'll ask again: Did Breitbart honestly not know the facts regarding the heavily-edited video he posted yesterday, which is how he ended up defending the ACORN hoax. Or did he knowingly push the phony NAACP story, which is what a lot of people think was his role in the ACORN hoax.
UPDATED: Why doesn't Breitbart take care of two lingering problem at once and release the full Sherrod/NAACP video as well as the unedited ACORN clips? Or maybe his reputation couldn't survive a document dump like that.
