OMIGOD!!!!! THEY FOUND THE WHITEY TAPE!!!!!

No, not that whitey tape. This is another whitey tape! (Or maybe it's even worse than a whitey tape!) And it hasn't been located, exactly -- but, as Ben Shapiro tells us over at World O' Breitbart, or whatever it is they're calling the site these days, the tape has been identified....

Sources inform Breitbart.com today that Pam Dickler, director of the 1998 production of The Love Song of Saul Alinsky in Chicago that included a panel discussion featuring then-State Sen. Barack Obama, has a video tape of the play.

And she won't release it.

"There is only one archive tape of the play and I have it," Dickler informed our source. "It is not in Chicago."

Dickler told our source that she doesn't believe she's ever watched the tape, and she doesn't know if it "can be viewed." But she added: "No one is going to see the tape."

She said she felt "very protective over it ... due to all of the interest from conservatives recently."...

Oh, this is going to keep a large crew of wingnut-welfare cases occupied for months -- years, maybe. But really, who knows -- does the damn thing even exist? Or is Dickler just messing with Young Ben's head? And if it does exist, is it just of the play or of the discussion as well?

If the discussion was taped, it's really hard to imagine that Obama said much -- according to the previous story about this, the discussion panel included nineteeen different boldface names, most of whom, unlike the then-little-known "Sen. Baraka Obama," were locally prominent enough to have their names spelled correctly on the theater's press release. And those nineteen promised play-discussers were "among many others."

Have you ever been to a discussion like this? I know Ben Shapiro and the other Breitbartniks would never have had such an experience, because it's too commie-liberal for them, but really, if you've got that many participants, a lot of them aren't going to say very much. I'm sure Shapiro thinks this would have been like some Party Congress that went on for hours and hours after the play, with everyone smoking Russian cigarettes, but people get bored after a while, especially if they just sat through a play, so my guess is that it broke up after an hour or so at most, and Obama's contribution mostly consisted of nodding in agreement. (Though if the tape is ever found, that's going to be the source of another Breitbart EXCLUSIVE!!! -- "Look! Studs Terkel says, 'It's a class issue,' and Obama nods in agreement! IT'S NOD-GATE!!!!!" Or some brief remark by Obama, barely audible over the inevitable feedback whine-note and lost in the theater's echo, will be misinterpreted: he'll have said, "How can we raise their standard of living?" and the Breitbartettes will say, "ARGH! ARGH! HE SAID, 'HONKY, RAISE THEIR STANDARD OF LIVING'!")

If the tape exists, will it ever be found? My guess is that it fell into the hands of some member of the troupe who subsequently unloaded it after a move to Vancouver or Brooklyn, and now it's gathering dust in some junk shop, cryptically labeled and wedged in between an Alf lunchbox and a stack of Gino Vannelli LPs. But that's not going to stop some right-wing plutocrat from doling out several million dollars in expense money to a bunch of pasty-faced College Republicans to try to find it. Wow, that will be money and time well spent.

(X-posted at Balloon Juice.)