Yep, and him applying an out of date fig leaf to it just adds to the self-pile-on.
O’Keefe will need several lifetimes to overcome the negative credibility he has constructed for himself. The reasonable default position for now is to reject anything he claims on any topic.
James and F-P, sittin’ in a tree…
I seem to recall seeing that type of line used before. Guy like you needs to come up with something better.
Just one more thing, almost forgot to notice that even O’Keefe had to admit that:
So, yeah, one could hang to the grasping straw that what they said was bad, but as pointed before, the illegal sounding things were said in this case to humor O’Keefe (clearly in this and other cases items like smuggling of young girls was not the intention of Vera nor there was ever any evidence of such a thing taking place). The trolling in that case had another reason: there was a concern by Vera to see how deep that yahoo in front of him was involved in the smuggling. ‘Too many leading questions to find loopholes or workarounds = he is likely a smuggler’ was then in the mind of Vera as he reported. Leading then to his call to the police right after the not dressed like a pimp “pimp”* left the office.
- First “pimp” there is the 1st traditional definition, the second “pimp” refers to the 2nd definition: “a despicable person.”
Copying myself from another forum…
Are you kidding? Shit yes I do. The “very large percentage” of undercover sting operations using this approach are illegal sting operations. When you entice someone to commit a crime they weren’t planning on committing is entrapment. Are you unfamiliar with this?
Granted, what O’Keefe did technically wasn’t entrapment. He didn’t have law enforcement powers; he didn’t actually convince them to commit real crimes. And he didn’t so much entice them to say bad things, as he made the situation unpleasant enough that his victims thought telling him what he wanted to hear was the easiest way to get rid of him.
What O’Keefe did is not entrapment, not “technically” and not otherwise.
You have no basis for this assumption other than the fact that you like those groups, and prefer to think that they were just “telling him what he wanted to hear”.
OK
Nope, that was O’Keeffe telling you and many others what many on the right wanted to hear. And the evidence tell us that regarding the pimp of truth we already know many examples were what his targets said were things that he did want to hear, simply because there is no evidence whatsoever that things like the smuggling or killings took place.
Oh, hush. FP loves to read my mind, and he’s damned near perfect at it. When he can’t refute a clear argument, it’s his first refuge. My skepticism of O’Keefe has nothing to do with O’Keefe’s documented habit of lying out his ass. Of course I don’t think it was entrapment, despite the entire absence of evidence that ACORN workers were helping real pimps and traffickers out. No, it’s only because I’m a liberal: I ignore the mountains of reason and facts that support calling O’Keefe a scam artist, and only call him a scam artist because of my ideology.
You’re confusing your own empty assertions with “a clear argument”.
You’ve not presented any sort of reason to believe that the people O’Keefe interacted with would not have done what they did had O’Keefe not convinced them to do it, which is what entrapment is about.
What you did is simply assert that these people only said these things to get O’Keefe to go away. This is based on either your own mind-reading ability or your ideology, and my money is on the latter.
…or, you know, on the absence of any evidence they ever did anything remotely like that except when O’Keefe pressured them into it.
Normally there’s no evidence of people doing wrong things. That’s the whole point of exposes.
You can’t just wave away exposes by saying “well besides for this expose what’s the other evidence that they do things of this sort? Entrapment!”
Just putting the words “pressured them into it” without any evidence of O’Keefe applying any sort of “pressure” is worthless.
I think the fact that several called the police right after he left speaks more to their states of mind than your fantasy. That investigations in New York and California both found no evidence of wrongdoing by ACORN doesn’t exactly help your position.
This is a guy who has plead guilty to entering a federal office under false pretenses and attempted to smear and discredit a journalist investigating him.
It’s good to know breaking the law is perfectly fine if you’re validating Republican wet dreams.
Some did call the police, some didn’t. No expose snares everyone who is targeted and it’s not logical to say that because some guys were innocent then everyone else must be too.
Investigations by law enforcement focus on whether illegal acts have been done, not whether morally reprehensible acts have been done.
There’s nowhere in this thread that I’ve said or implied that everything O’Keefe has done is fine or that he’s a fine guy or anything of the sort. All I said is that his reporting is “onto something”. The rest is your own “wet dream”.
Goddamn, dude. The point of exposés is to show people who are already doing wrong. Look at a list of exposés:
-Going Clear exposes Scientologists. It doesn’t trick people into agreeing that Scientology is a good thing.
-Prophet’s Prey exposes Warren Jeffs. It doesn’t trick people into marrying underage girls.
-Sons of Perdition exposes a different aspect of FLDS. It doesn’t trick people into abandoning their teenage sons.
-The Mormon Proposition (damn, there are a lot of exposés of Mormons on this list!) exposes Mormon involvement in Prop 8. It doesn’t trick people into funding FOcus on the Family.
-Trouble in Amish Paradise exposes cruelty among Amish. It doesn’t trick people into excommunicating skeptics.
-Blood in the Face exposes Neonazis. It doesn’t trick people into saying racist shit.
Are you seeing a pattern? A real exposé finds an actual ill being done in the world and exposes people doing it. The evidence of the ill comes first, the uncovering is a response.
O’Keefe had no evidence of this ill’s occurrence. He manufactured that evidence.
That’s precisely how one makes an entrapment defense: you show that there’s no evidence the person was going to commit a crime, other than the response of the person to the undercover agent convincing them to commit the crime. Besides the undercover agent, what other evidence do you have that they do things of this sort? If none, the entrapment defense stands.
I get the impression you know very little about entrapment as a legal concept, is that correct?
You’re just playing with words.
You list some exposes and say “it doesn’t trick people into …” with the implication that O’Keefe was tricking people into doing something. But the basic part you’re missing is any basis for your assertion that he tricked them or pressured them or whatever word you’re so casually slipping in there.
The point of an expose is that it’s hard to find evidence of things that people might by inclined to deny. You present a situation where you suspect that people might be inclined to do wrong and if they do it in this instance then it’s evidence that they might be inclined to do it otherwise.
The opposite is correct. It appears that you don’t know anything about entrapment.
You might want to read the opening paragraph of your own link upthread. “In criminal law, entrapment is a practice whereby a law enforcement agent induces a person to commit a criminal offence that the person would have otherwise been unlikely to commit. It ‘is the conception and planning of an offence by an officer, and his procurement of its commission by one who would not have perpetrated it except for the trickery, persuasion or fraud of the officer’” (emphasis added).
The fact that there’s no other evidence of the guy doing this type of thing in other instances is not evidence of entrapment. What you need is evidence that the guy was unlikely to do it other than the officer taking extraordinary methods to get the guy to do it.
So if the FBI offers a politician a bribe or offers to sell someone drugs etc. that is not entrapment. If the guy turns them down and they hassle the guy until he agrees or the like then you get into entrapment issues.
Your understanding of entrapment is not uncommon but is wrong nonetheless.
Or even simpler: their targets were giving him rope to see if he was going to hang himself. And what was eventually found in the courts and the settlements was that O’Keefe did so.
Of course, that an organization that helped poor people people vote and to offer other services was removed with thought crimes that were not even that, is considered a great accomplishment by willful ignorants on the right.