James O’Keefe, of PimpGate/Louisiana Watergate Fame, May Not Be The Best Person For Conservatives To Champion

Yes, yes, I know: I’m stating the obvious. But in light of what Breitbart and Ben Stein and others have said about the young Mr. O’Keefe (who, for those of who don’t know, was arrested with three other men for allegedly attempting to tamper with Senator Mary Landrieu’s phone lines) and considering how Chad Rogers of The Dead Pelican has dedicated a lot of precious space on his website aggregating stories defending Mr. O’Keefe, it’s probably appropriate to discover what, exactly, Mr. O’Keefe was up to prior to his sudden rise to fame. Is this just another folly of youth?

From Salon.com:

By O’Keefe’s own account, his racial troubles became acute when he entered the multicultural atmosphere of Rutgers University’s dormitory system. In an online diary that has since been scrubbed from the Web (but not before being captured on Daily Kos), he wrote that he was forced to live on an all-black dormitory floor after refusing to live with the gay roommate he was initially assigned. O’Keefe claimed his next roommate was “an Indian midget … who smelled like sh*t.” The roommate left, however, and was replaced by “a greek kid.” The new roommate complained to a residential administrator that O’Keefe had called his neighbors “n****rs,” prompting the school to expel him from the dorm. He rejected the accusation as a “complete lie,” writing, “I was lead out of the room crying and screaming at him and my situation, no friends, no one one [sic] to talk to, forced to go in front of a black man, Dean Tolbert, to defend myself and help explain that I did not call anyone any names.”

I suppose his white roommate was just lying about O’Keefe’s remarks, and it was all just one big conspiracy to get him rusticated. Riiiiight.

And then there’s this:

During the call, O’Keefe offered a donation to the clinic on the condition that it would be earmarked to pay for aborting African-American fetuses. “Because there’s definitely way too many black people in Ohio,” O’Keefe remarked to the receptionist. “So, I’m just trying to do my part.”

O’Keefe’s termination by the Leadership Institute hardly ended his career as a conservative activist. Right-wing online publicist Andrew Breitbart, hearing of the merry prankster’s exploits, hired him to carry out the ACORN operation that would make him famous. Since his arrest, however, some of O’Keefe’s former associates are scrambling to save face. “I am shocked by the reports of this behavior,” declared O’Keefe’s collaborator on the ACORN operation, Hannah Giles. (Giles had tarted up as a prostitute for the stunt.)

Shocked, I tell you.