IS IT ME, OR DOES THE ACORN PIMP'S STORY NOT MAKE SENSE?

There's starting to be general agreement that James O'Keefe wasn't trying to wiretap Mary Landrieu's office after all -- but to me the story isn't quite holding together.

The New Orleans Times-Picayune has a good roundup:

...The theory getting the most traction is that the men were trying to catch Landrieu staffers in the act of ignoring phone calls from unhappy constituents or admitting they had done so in the past....

NBC's Pete Williams, quoting a law enforcement official, reports that the men wanted to see how Landrieu's local office staff would respond if the phones were inoperative....

O'Keefe became famous last year with secretly taped videos that brought the community organization ACORN to its knees....

The Washington Post reports that O'Keefe signaled that he was hoping to top that in 2010....

"2008: Planned Parenthood VPs fired 2009: ACORN defunded 2010: Get ready cuz this is about to get heavy," he wrote on his public Twitter page....

But how the hell was this -- at least as it's now described ("catch[ing] Landrieu staffers in the act of ignoring phone calls from unhappy constituents or admitting they had done so in the past") -- going to be even remotely as newsworthy as the ACORN story, or even the story in which Planned Parenthood workers were secretly taped and embarrassed, reportedly after conversations about fudging a legal birthdate for an abortion and accepting a donation targeted specifically at aborting non-whites?

It doesn't make sense. The Landrieu story would have been much more boring -- even if you were a Louisiana resident. It wouldn't have hit any hot buttons of life and death, or race, or underage sex. And why would disabling the phones make O'Keefe's point effectively? Wouldn't it be better to have one conspirator calling in and getting the phone to ring while another conspirator with a hidden camera secretly interviewed the staffer who was ignoring the call (if that really is the usual M.O. of Landrieu's staff)?

The wingnut noise machine is now in nonstop whining mode because news organizations initially characterized this as a wiretap attempt.

Maybe it wasn't. But to me the current story doesn't hold up either. And if what we're hearing now is the truth about what O'Keefe was doing in Landrieu's office, I have to assume he had something else in mind as the future endeavor that was "about to get heavy" in the eyes of the public. Unless getting arrested (and subsequent martyrdom on the right) was the point. Or unless the "get heavy" quote was just O'Keefe tweeting with an Eminem song stuck in his head.