Shortly before he died, Andrew Breitbart promised that he would shortly reveal explosive, racially themed videos of Barack Obama from college, videos that would “change this election.” Buzzfeed has gotten hold of videos that its editor, Ben Smith, believes are the fabled source that Breitbart was poised to show the world. And it is explosive:
This could really hurt Obama with blue-collar whites in the Midwest!
Oh, wait — that is not the actual video. The video — the version obtained by Buzzfeed, anyway — shows Obama speaking at a rally at Harvard and sounding pretty much exactly like the guy he is today:
In evaluating this claim, it’s probably helpful to bear in mind some relevant history. In 2010, Big Government released a video of a USDA employee, Shirley Sherrod, proclaiming her anti-white prejudices before an NAACP audience. The Obama administration, terrified that the story would identify it with black militancy, fired her immediately. But the story quickly fell apart. It turns out that the video was selectively edited, and Sherrod was actually describing her youthful feelings of racial resentment (understandable, since her relative was lynched when she was young) as a negative lesson, in support of her broader point that she opposes racism against whites. Big Government engaged in an epic bout of denial and blame shifting rather than own up to its role in smearing her.
Now, to be fair, if you tease out the politics here, Obama was taking a more left-wing position than you would probably see him advocating as president. Obama was a moderate and unifying figure, but within the context of a political debate that was fairly radical. There are interesting lessons to be gleaned as to what this tells us about him. But the smoking gun that finally exposes him as a racist commie remains has yet to turn up. So either Breitbart was engaging in massive hyperbole in the course of ginning up white racial paranoia — no way that would ever happen! — or else Buzzfeed has a completely different video.
Big Government now says that the Buzzfeed video is the same video, but it was “selectively edited.” There’s more to come! “Over the course of the day,” promises the feisty right-wing site dedicated to exposing truths that desperate liberals must hide from America, “Breitbart.com will be releasing additional footage that has been hidden by Obama’s allies in the mainstream media and academia.”
So Big Government’s accusation that Buzzfeed is engaged in selective editing and is covering up a heinous scandal of the anti-white racism it finds so pervasive, is probably not something we should accept at face value.
Update: Nearly fifteen minutes have lapsed since the beginning of Hannity’s interview with Breitbart.com’s editor-in-chief Joel Pollak and editor-at-large Ben Shapiro, and absolutely nothing has changed. There’s no new video as of yet. Hannity and the pair are trying to squeeze meaning from Obama’s relationship with “radical” professor Derrick Bell.
