JAMES O'KEEFE'S COMPLETELY UNJUSTIFIED PARANOIA

Did anyone actually watch "Right on the Edge," the Abbie Boudreau report on right-wingers that aired on CNN this weekend? The documentary made news for James O'Keefe's planned sex prank, which O'Keefe and at least one or two members of his crew seemed to believe was their best defense against biased reporting from the liberal media -- but what the hell were they worried about? Apart from Boudreau's coverage of the sex incident, the piece was a wet kiss to these young agitators. Heather at Crooks and Liars had it right:

...it basically glorified a bunch of right wing wingnut ambush "journalists" with friendly interviews and no perspective from anyone being harmed by their actions....

The show featured a series of softball with the group that were about as hard-hitting as you might expect when watching the Oprah Winfrey Show.

I would imagine that it would have been all favorable coverage of them had it not been for the stunt O'Keefe tried to pull on Boudreau....

Heather links to the transcript, and, if anything, she's being unfair to Oprah, who might be more pointed than this in dealing with, say, Ryan Sorba, best known for an anti-gay diatribe at the last CPAC convention and mostly seen in the video heckling gay people, which is apparently his job (although, of course, he has a book deal):

BOUDREAU: At age 28, Ryan Sorba is the oldest young conservative we've met....

BOUDREAU: He invited us to a Chicago suburb for an anti-gay event called "Americans for Truth Academy."...

BOUDREAU: Some in the movement tell us he's extreme, yet, like the others, he's not afraid to speak his mind and push his views even if it offends people.

Wow -- you really dug deep to get at the truth there, Abbie.

Everything in the show that isn't about O'Keefe is like that. It's not an investigative report on the movement -- it's a DVD extra. It's the movement's demi-stars presented exactly the way they want to be presented, sometimes via long stretches of unfiltered video they themselves provided Boudreau, which are presented virtually without comment. No wonder one of the profiled youths, Jason Mattera, has been plugging the show on his Twitter feed ("At 8pm tonight, your TV remote should be turned to this").

So what the hell was James O'Keefe worried about? The refs have been successfully worked -- Boudreau and CNN clearly felt that putting these kids in the best possible light was the way to go. It would have happened to O'Keefe as well, if he hadn't snatched defeat from the jaws of wingnut victory.