You know those slightly surrealistic scenes in All The President’s Men, where Woodward and Bernstein, played by Redford and Hoffman, call up various sources from the Nixon White House to verify their side of the Watergate story?
That’s the scene that Andrew Breitbart recreates to kick off Big Journalism, his latest media salon:
I couldn’t believe I was having this conversation. It felt like a scene from a movie that conveniently ties plot points together when two critical characters in the storyline share a moment of implausible significance – where the intrepid reporter finally runs his target to ground.
AdvertisementSo at first I had trouble getting my words out. “I’m Andrew Breitbart,” I exhaled. Instead of hanging up, Bertha Lewis laughed like someone I would probably like in a different setting – but certainly not in this lifetime now that we are permanently and publicly tied to one another as media-based adversaries.
I knew the awkwardness of the moment would turn into trouble when I started asking her pointed questions and, sure enough, we soon we found ourselves in trouble.
“Did you go to the White House last year?” I asked.
Bertha Laughed heartily. ”No,” she said.
“Really?” I pushed.
“No. One hundred per cent not. Not this year. Not last year. Not ever,” she stated firmly, all the while maintaining an awkward and ironic joviality that was likely born of the weirdness of our impromptu exchange.
“Are you aware that the White House is claiming that the proof you are not the Bertha Lewis who was given a personal tour of the White House residence in early September is that you are Bertha M. Lewis? I asked. “And the one on the visitors log is Bertha E. Lewis. In an online database I see you once had ‘Evans’ in your name.”
“That was a former husband, who is now dead,” she said.
“I’m sorry about that,” I responded sincerely, as we defied the odds that the awkwardness couldn’t get any greater.
Lewis ended the call with the perfect compliment from someone accustomed to anything less than fawning attention from the media: “’You are a bad, bad, bad journalist,’ Bertha Lewis exclaimed.”
Welcome to the world of Big Journalism.
Elsewhere in his post, Breitbart notes:
The mainstream media largely ignored the ACORN story because any exploration into the tapes is bad news for the political left, President Obama and the Democratic Party. The Washington Post reporter who was forced to retract her lies about James O’Keefe even argued with me when I answered her question about seeing the ACORN tapes and thinking they were “The Abu Ghraib of the Great Society.”
“You just caught a bunch of dummies on tape!” Carol Leonnig protested after I answered her question as honestly as I could.
“That’s what Bush called the “soft bigotry of lowered expectations,” I exclaimed. “Those people were SMART and knew how to brilliantly rig the system to defraud taxpayers!”
That’s a topic that Andrew discussed with us at Western CPAC in October:
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