The underwhelming, not-so-secret video of Barack Obama speaking at Hampton University in 2007, which forcibly resurfaced this week in a coordinated effort by conservative media, may have cost its peddlers money despite the fact that most of it was already public. Some anonymous huckster going by the pseudonym Sore Throwt, “a pun on Deep Throat,” the Times tells us, had been shopping the video to right-wing media for at least a week before finding a distributor in the Daily Caller’s Tucker Carlson and his gang of merry race-baiters. Hopefully he got a good deal.
In his Fox News re-premiere of the video, which shows Obama speaking to a black audience (including Revered Jeremiah Wright) about Hurricane Katrina and the L.A. riots, Carlson admitted, “This was covered at the time. There were reporters in the room. I had a show at the time on another channel and I covered the remarks that were released.” As the Times reports today, “news networks have had it in their libraries since it was shot.”
But for an unedited copy, the deleted scenes from which have only proved interesting to Carlson and his cohort, there was an asking price:
Sore Throwt wanted to be paid in exchange for handing over the video, this person said, speaking anonymously in order to divulge a conversation he had promised to keep confidential.
Mr. Carlson would not say whether he paid for the tape.
But his defensiveness is telling: “We’ve already seen this? Really? That’s untrue,” Carlson whined to the Times. “I feel like I’m in an alternative universe.” Ditto.
