James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles, who became the darlings of Fox News last fall for posing as a pimp and prostitute to secretly videotape ACORN workers in five cities giving them stupid advice, are coming to Buena Park Saturday to preach to the choir.
The choir would be the hard-line conservative California Republican Assembly (CRA), which holds its “75th Anniversary Celebration & Endorsing Convention” Friday through Sunday at the Knott's Berry Farm Resort Hotel.
O'Keefe, 25, and Giles, who turns 21 on March 15, are Saturday night's dinner banquet speakers. These young 'uns deserve the prime speaking slot because their undercover work captured ACORN workers “eager to assist with tax evasion, human smuggling and
child prostitution,” claims the CRA. “These videos ultimately led Congress to terminate
all of ACORN's federal funding.”
That description conveniently leaves out many important facts about the speakers and the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.
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ACORN may be the bogeyman dittoheads blame for putting Barack Obama in the White House, but the 400,000-member-strong coalition of community groups also has a history of helping low-
to moderate-income Americans with health care, voter registration,
neighborhood safety, affordable housing and other social issues.
No, one would not expect the CRA fact-checkers to include that, but they should have mentioned this: after a five-month investigation, the Brooklyn, New York, district attorney's office found no criminal activity on O'Keefe and Giles' ACORN videos.
Nor does the CRA divulge that the blogger who released the tapes to the world, Andrew Breitbart,
is now backing off from his earlier allegations of “criminality” being
present on the tapes.
And the biggest hole of all in the speaker descriptions: the fact that O'Keefe in knee deep in his own–how did Breitbart put it again? Oh, yes–alleged criminality. He was among the Republipukes caught red-handed trying to tamper with the New Orleans office phones of U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu–a federal offense.
Friday night's CRA dinner speakers are: Hollywood filmmaker David Zucker (Airplane, the Scary
Movie franchise and “the 2009 conservative classic, An
American Carol“); marriage-inequality huckster Ron Prentice; and Pacific Justice Institute's constitutional mincer, Kevin Snider (He defended Rick Warren's right to lead Obama's invocation!).
Sunday morning's prayer breakfast features the inspiring words of Gary “Pastor Z” Zelesky, who heads up the Mancave Ministries at Sunset Christian Center in Rocklin near Sacramento.
It's fitting that all this is going down on the sacred grounds of that long gone paranoid loon Walter Knott, who, as Gustavo Arellano once put it, “used the massive revenues from Ma Knott's kitchen
to publish some of the funniest anti-commie pamphlets this side of
Jimmy Utt's mimeograph, helped start the Lincoln Club, and organized the
Orange County School of Anti-Communism, a crucial spark to create our
unique brand of conservatism.”
Can I get another amen from the choir?
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.