On August 5, presidential candidate Michele Bachmann appeared at a Christian music festival in Iowa. In the audience was veteran blogger Robert Stacy McCain, who recorded her Christian testimony with his trusty video camera. (Note to any New York Times editors who might be reading this: that’s when evangelicals talk about how they found Jesus. Jesus does not require a lawyer to be present while this testimony is delivered.)
As it happened, there was heavy rain in Des Moines that day. Bachmann warmed up the thoroughly drenched crowd by asking, “Who likes wet people?” Everyone whooped and yelled. A heartfelt expression of Christian faith followed, in which Bachmann noted “we have a God of the winds and rain, and He’s a mighty God.”
McCain joked that liberals would run “screaming from the room” after watching this video, if their heads didn’t explode first. He didn’t account for a third possibility: dishonest far-Left hacks would steal his video and edit it to defame Bachmann.
An obscure blogger did precisely that, inserting a caption to make it look as if Bachmann had said “Who likes white people?” and received rowdy applause. Of course, Bachmann’s subsequent comment about the God of winds and rain had to be surgically removed to make this work.
The slander video made its way to larger, easily suckered sites like Wonkette and Perez Hilton, who would have bought this garbage no-questions-asked if the sleazy blogger had used CGI to put Bachmann in a white sheet and hood. Perez Hilton even re-pirated the smear video to insert his own watermark.
Of course, it’s a short trip from nutty left-wing blogs to the mainstream media, so Michelle Castillo of CBS News made the false edited video her number one selection in her “Top 5 Viral Videos of the Week.” She introduced it like this:
Everything that comes out of Michele Bachmann's mouth is gold. A new video has her asking a crowd of people, "Who likes white people?" It doesn't make any sense, so many explanations are surfacing from "White People Soul Power" being the band that played before, to the fact it was raining and Bachmann is asking about "wet" people.
So at CBS News, the actual, easily-verified truth chugs into a distant third place as the explanation for a non-sensical video clip, right behind the name of a non-existent band. If it comes from a big liberal blog, it must be too good to check!
This was not only dishonest, but a violation of McCain’s copyright, so an attorney became involved. This produced the following hilarious “apology” from the sleazebag video editor:
I want to apologize for misusing Stacey Robert McCain’s original video . . . I was angry so I decided to take Mrs. Bachmann’s line out of context to make her seem more overtly racist in light of her recent signing of that Iowa marriage pledge that said black children were better off under slavery than in Obama’s America. Whether or not I dislike Michele Bachmann, it wasn’t right to deliver a dishonest blow like that. I wanted to apologize to Mr. McCain and all of you directly. . . I have removed the video from my Youtube channel.
Classy! I’d like to say that I don’t understand how a creature like this can look at himself in the mirror, but it’s really not hard to understand. The mixture of totalitarian “by any means necessary” politics and gibbering stupidity is a powerful brew, and highly addictive. The two ingredients are naturally drawn to one another. Of course this guy couldn’t make his dopey “black children were better off under slavery” point without being dishonest, and felt perfectly justified in lying… right up until he received a letter printed on the letterhead of a law firm.
Speaking of stupidity, as McCain points out, the smear artist’s written admission of a malicious, retaliatory political motive for stealing and editing the video will prove highly useful to Bachmann’s camp, should they decide to pursue a libel suit.
