DC Trawler

If you’re less curious about who mentored Obama than about how Sarah Palin maintains a year-round tan in Alaska, you might be a liberal

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Or a member of the media (PTR).

Over the years a pattern has emerged: A story breaks that could embarrass the Democrats, so the self-styled gatekeepers of the news swoop in to tell us why it’s not important. Rielle Hunter. Van Jones. Anthony Weiner. ACORN. Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. That’s just off the top of my head. I’m sure you can think of other examples. Every time, our brave and brilliant friends in the media dig in their heels and try to keep those stories from developing, somehow imagining that we still trust them. Imagining that in the age of the Internet, they still control the flow of information. “Here’s why this news story this isn’t really a news story” has become its own genre. Eventually, each time they give up and pretend they were covering the story all along.

Now it might be time to add a new name to that list: Derrick Bell.

Yesterday Breitbart.com posted this video.

Apparently, this was the video that Andrew Breitbart had been talking about for months before he died. Does it live up to the hype? Who’s Derrick Bell, anyway? Why should we care about this?

I dunno. Maybe we shouldn’t. It’s only been up for 24 hours, but already a lot of people are telling me it’s nothing:

New York Magazine: Breitbart’s Obama Video Is a Total Dud
Washington Monthly: Bottom of the Barrel
Wonkette: Obama Hugs Black Guy
TBogg: Help a Brother Out
Crooks and Liars: Hannity and Breitbart Acolytes Team Up To Foxify a New Villain: Professor Bell
The Moderate Voice: Breitbart’s Last Big Scoop Video of a Young Obama: A Fizzle?
The Daily Show’s Indecision Forever blog: Barack Obama Once Hugged a Man, Just Like Stalin
Shakesville: If You’re Not a Straight White Cis Conservative Man, You Are Definitely a Radical and Probably a Traitor
The Raw Story: PBS already aired Breitbart’s Obama footage
Sadly, No!: They Can’t All Be the Unfinished Symphony
Balloon Juice: Guinness Book of Records is Going to Need to Open a Category for “Fail”

I think some of those headlines are sarcastic, but I can’t really tell!

Well, maybe they’re right. Maybe this doesn’t mean anything and there’s no news here. After all, it’s not like somebody found a rock with a bad word painted on it. It’s not like Obama ever left his dog on the roof of his car. It’s not like one of his children died just after being born and he didn’t deal with it the way Alan Colmes would have. It’s just a guy from Obama’s past who most people have never heard of. It’s probably nothing. This is probably all the Breitbart team has, and now the story is dead.

Congratulations, lefties. You did it. You defeated Breitbart again, one last time!