Roy Moore accused of sexually assaulting a 14 year old

[NotDonVito]

The only people voting for Doug Jones are Avondale hipsters who will probably be too high to drive to the polls, or they couldn't get off work from Starbucks.

He's got that black vote though, he's from the hood lol. I used to live in downtown Bessemer, and even I wouldn't drive through Fairfield at night.

 

[thraxil]

The more people realize O'keefe is a fraudulent hack, the better.

No one's going to see it though. The main story on Fox News right now is the latest version of "but her emails". No mention of this. No mention of Trump using a racial slur in front of Navajo war heroes.

If anything, I worry that most people will hear something about the story in passing won't have the attention to understand exactly who did what and all they'll remember is something about the Washington Post and "fake news" and confirm whatever biases they already have.

I mean, Veritas *succeeded* in taking down ACORN despite clear evidence that they edited videos and misrepresented basically everything (O'Keefe was successfully sued for $100k by one of the employees in the video). That was a huge victory for the pro voter disenfranchisement side, so they'll keep doing it. They pull this crap over and over again. Even if they usually come out of it looking like fraudulent hacks, if they can take down an org like ACORN every now and then, they'll keep getting funding (the Trump Foundation donated $10k to Veritas in 2015) and they'll keep doing it. When they succeed, they succeed. When they fail, like this time, it still just plays into the "fake news" narrative because most people aren't paying close enough attention.

 

[bostjan]

No mention of Trump using a racial slur in front of Navajo war heroes.

Not to get too excited about defending Trump, but I don't think he meant it as a racial slur so much as an equally offensive and inappropriate dig at a political opponent over a racial issue. I'm not sure why I even feel it's important enough to waste my breath to point out the distinction. I guess that a racial slur would make Trump look racist, but this dig at Warren just continues to make Trump look like a beligerently insensitive dolt. To pick on any opponent because of their race is just stupid and tonedeaf, and to bring it up at a celebration of war heroes, especially in a war that was partially fueled by racial intolerance, and the only widespread war waged over an attempt at genocide, is just an all new level of idiocy that I don't think there are words to describe how icky it should make everyone feel. The closest thing I can think of would be a bad Roy Schneider comedy's most cringey scene, but in real life, and where the character is the actual President of the USA.

 

[Drew]

I guess that a racial slur would make Trump look racist, but this dig at Warren just continues to make Trump look like a beligerently insensitive dolt.

I look at it the same way as you. I don't think it's a racial slur, so much as a dig at Warren's alleged ethnicity. It certainly has racist tones to it, but not because of his actual wording so much as his intent. Either way, it pales compared to the fact that it only succeeds in making him look like an immature schoolboy - that was NOT the place to make that joke, in a ceremony commemorating Code Talkers. No place to try to score a few cheap political points.

I came to post that O'Keefe/Project "Veritas" story myself.

It's pretty astounding that O'Keefe is so dumb... but he just caused this situation because he's apparently unaware, like much of the Fox News staff, of what actual journalistic investigation is, as well as journalistic ethics.

Many current conservatives think that news is just something invented by the writer, in the same way many conservatives feel the same way about science. Both mistaken beliefs ignore that actual evidence is necessary before making claims about reality.

Yeah, I don't know what's more shocking - the fact that O'Keefe thought the Washington Post wouldn't try to do any sort of a background check at all on a person coming to them with a sensational story (I mean, I guess that isn't so shocking, so much as it is confirmation of what he believes - he's trying to prove the Post is a politically motivated hatchet job with no journalistic integrety, so he treats them as such, and promptly gets caught with his pants down when they do due diligence on his plant), or the fact that, knowing full well that the Post had a video crew with the journalist that confronted him about this afterwards and had full, unedited video of the interaction, he STILL tried to do his usual out-of-context edit job to make it look like he was the one pressing the post and they were dodging his question. All the Post had to do - which they did - was just release their raw footage.

James O'Keefe is an absolute tool. I guess if I was that bad at journalism and thought I was pretty good, then maybe I'd expect an actual newspaper to be just as incompetent too.

The only thing that worries me is thraxil's (well taken) point, that the Fox/Breitbart viewing contingent will see O'Keefe's video, hear about but neither read nor watch the Post's story and video of the interaction, and take his claim that the Post is trying to change the story and deflect from his work at face value.

And, the thing that I keep coming back to, is that we now live in a country where this is the norm, that people of different political persuasions can no longer even agree on a set of basic facts. And while the handful of right-wing and right-leaving voices here will accuse me of bias, here we're talking about the Post with unedited raw footage of an exchange and O'Keefe doing his typical "provide a couple soundbytes from the video, but then give narrative context around them to make them sound like something totally different than the unedited footage shows it actually was" routine; it's a pretty clear scenario of one party presenting the truth while the other party gets caught trying to fabricate an alternative truth.