James O'Keefe Ties Media Matters In Knots

You’ve undoubtedly seen the latest video from James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas. After years and years of Democrats claiming “Voter ID” laws are unnecessary and inherently racist, the undercover video proves just how easy it is to commit voter fraud. This has sent the Leftist echo-chamber into fits. Ten minutes of video undoing decades of demagoguery about the “myth” of voter fraud being an excuse to keep poor minorities (and old people) from voting was going to elicit a reaction.

It didn’t take long for the guardians at the gates of the Left’s ideological iron curtain to jump into action. Within hours ThinkProgress and Media Matters were out with their hit pieces attempting to control the damage which had just been done on their carefully crafted narrative. In their first piece, Media Matters’ panic is palpable from the first paragraph:

James O’Keefe, a discredited liar with a history of releasing deceptively edited videos that ultimately fail to back up his claims, has released his latest video. This one purports to demonstrate how “Dead People Vote” in New Hampshire, but instead largely shows the logical incoherence of the right wing’s voter fraud paranoia.

Take note of the first sentence with all the statements of “fact.” Every link (except the one pointing to the video) is supposed to back up the claim being made, right? They lead to other Media Matters articles – because their word is good enough. They clearly don’t have an agenda. Look, readers! We’ve done all the work for you. Don’t pay any attention to instance after instance of someone very easily obtaining a ballot using the name of someone who is dead. It never happens! Why? Because we’ve determined O’Keefe is a “discredited liar,” that’s why! Hey, there’s a squirrel!

Within minutes of putting out the “O’Keefe’s a liar. The video is probably deceptively edited.” narrative, the smear merchants got together another angle: O’Keefe’s video – where he shows just how easy it is to obtain a ballot using the name of a dead person – really proves that it is really hard to do it. Seriously. They wrote this:

Discredited fraud James O’Keefe’s latest video attempts to prove how easy it is to steal an election without voter ID laws on the books, but actually demonstrates just how difficult it would be to pull off such a plot.

Right. Because the video you just watched, where a man armed with nothing but the name and address of a dead person obtained a ballot from poll workers and could have easily voted, proves that voter fraud is a myth because it is too hard. There are laws on the books, guys! Like gun laws, they stop people from breaking the law! The logic is flawless.

It never seems to cross the author’s mind that an ID would have actually stopped the operative from getting a ballot. That’s too easy. The way to stop the very thing that happened on video, multiple times, is to pass laws – except for the most effective law where someone who wants to vote proves they are who they claim to be with a valid piece of identification.

The public policy issue the video actually shows is the need for voting records to be kept up to date in the months before an election. The deceased should not be on the rolls and election officials need to do a better job of keeping those lists clean. But since conservative elites (and donors) are far more interested in voter ID laws that have the effect of keeping Democratic voters from the polls, that’s the tack that O’Keefe takes.

Oh, the real solution is government bureaucracy working efficiently! Where would we be in this world without the geniuses at Media Matters? We don’t need no stinking voter ID laws! We need to “do a better job” of record keeping. That’s it! Everyone knows the only reason the evil Republicans want people to prove they are who they say they are is because they want to prevent Democratic voters from voting – because the majority of them don’t have IDs… or they’re dead.

Clearly, Media Matters is in panic mode. O’Keefe’s a liar, they say. But if he’s not lying, it still doesn’t prove anything. Oh, and even if it proves that you can get a few ballots using a dead person’s information, it really couldn’t work because you need a lot of votes to make a difference:

An actual attempt to carry out such a plot would run into the problem shared by all such schemes to steal elections through in-person voters, rather than in the vote counting phase: without knowing how many votes they need to steal to win, conspirators must engage in a very large effort.

Well, that’s a pretty compelling argument. All elections are blowouts and they’re never won by unfathomably thin margins – like 537 votes, or 312 votes. Never happens. Never.

The director of South Carolina’s Department of Motor Vehicles has told the State Law Enforcement Division that more than 900 people who were recorded as having voted were actually dead.

Man, we have a serious record keeping problem. Wouldn’t it be great if we could easily avoid the problems with horrible record keeping – hey, you think maybe someone actually keeps horrible records on purpose? – by having people show IDs before voting? I know it would be tough for people to get IDs to vote, and drive, and buy alcohol, and open bank accounts, and generally function in today’s society, but there has to be a way. Let’s stop the ID deficit!

Of course, the smear merchants aren’t done. They apparently have election experts on speed dial and are trying to make the case that the person who demolished the “voter fraud is a myth” narrative broke the law.

Now election officials and election law experts are suggesting that he may be implicated in another illegal scheme. They say that in attempting to create an undercover video showing how easy it is to commit voter fraud, James O’Keefe’s associates may have run afoul of those laws themselves.

Because O’Keefe isn’t a journalist, you see. He wasn’t doing what journalists have done for years to expose serious problems – going undercover. No, he was just breaking the law in an attempt to protect the racist voter ID laws that make it too easy to prevent people from using a dead person’s information to obtain a ballot and vote.

The solution to the problem of dead people voting is easy. The aggressive opposition to the easy solution makes you wonder if someone out there has a vested interest in making it easy to cast fraudulent votes.