Obama’s minions facilitate the crimes of ACORN and the New Black Panthers, but throw the book at young people who want to expose the dishonesty of Democrat Pols & their supporters.

The crusading young conservative investigative journalist James O’Keefe has been arrested in New Orleans, charged with a federal felony. Writing in The American Spectator, Ben Stein compares O’Keefe’s prank to voter intimidation by Democratic activists:

During the last Presidential election, a gang of men calling themselves Black Panthers showed up at a polling place in Michigan. They threatened any voter who did not vote for Barack Obama. This was witnessed and documented….

The bullying was barely reported in the media. Even though it is an unequivocal violation of voting rights laws, it was decided by Obama’s Attorney General, Eric Holder, not to prosecute the case at all….

A few days ago, four young conservatives posed as telephone repairmen and entered the branch office of Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana in New Orleans. Their goal was to check to see if the phone system in the office was working. The men, under the leadership of a young media impresario named James O’Keefe, were querying why constituents of Sen. Landrieu had been unable to register negative feelings about Obamacare on the Senator’s phone line. They had been told that perhaps the phones were out of order….

Back at Sen. Landrieu’s office, someone was suspicious of the O’Keefe group and called police. The men were arrested and are now charged with a federal felony of something called tampering with a federal phone line….

But the differential justice gets much worse, as it turns out. The Christmas panty bomber was afforded more rights than this young American, according to a FOXNews report:

….the man who first published James O’Keefe’s explosive videos exposing wrongdoing at community organizer ACORN came to the filmmaker’s defense, claiming he “sat in jail for 28 hours without access to an attorney” while the prosecutor made his case to the media.

“James O’Keefe sat in jail for 28 hours without access to an attorney, while the U.S. attorney leaked the information about his arrest, helping the media frame it as ‘Watergate Junior,’” Breitbart said.

“The panty bomber on Christmas was given — you know, this guy’s from Al Qaeda, and he’s not even an American citizen, and he’s given access to an attorney right away,” Breitbart said….

The DC Trawler suspects a clever journalistic strategy here — Andrew Breitbart, master of the rope-a-dope:

If you’re too young to remember Ali vs. Foreman — which most of the people I work with are, damn them — Ali used something he called the rope-a-dope to win. Basically, he let Foreman beat the hell out of him until Foreman got tired, and then Ali swabbed the canvas with him. “Rope-a-dope” has now become shorthand for any strategy where you let your opponent think he’s winning, as you bide your time until you’re ready to strike back.

Breitbart used this technique to great effect during the ACORN sting. He predicted exactly what his opponent was going to do — make statements of fact that they knew not to be true — and allowed it. Then he made his countermove by proving them wrong with hard evidence. He did this over and over, and they fell for it every time.

Has he done it again? We’ve just had a full week of what MSNBC has dubbed, in a masterpiece of understatement, “Watergate Jr.” Big win, right? Well…

Sense of Events expands on the “rope-a-dope” analogy:

In politics, the term has come to mean opening an apparent advantage to one’s opponents in the hope they won’t see the trap laid for them. Chess players, of course, use this ploy all time, sacrificing pieces to gain positional advantage or to capture more valuable pieces in return…. Rope-a-dope’s inherent risk is worth taking only if one’s opponent is highly predictable. And when it comes to the media, there’s no problem there.

Comments at Gateway Pundit add to the litany of differential justice:

lyle — Of course, we’ve seen US Attorneys trample the law and violate ethical standards in pursuit of political enemies like Ted Stevens and Lewis Libby. In both of those cases, US Attorneys conspired with the mainstream media to construct a false narrative against their victims, and used it to convict them.

Usually it works. The Texas prosecutor who harrassed Tom Delay never had any evidence, but drove his victim out of office. Martha Coakley kept a man she knew to be innocent in jail for three years, and became the political machine’s senatorial candidate. The Duke lacrosse prosecutor won reelection through his appalling misconduct.

It must be a coincidence that they’re all Democrats.

Lance — Sandy Berger, National Security Advisor under Clinton, stole and destroyed evidence from the National Archives. Evidence that someone didn’t want the 911 commission to see. He was charged with a misdemeanor….

For ambitious Democrat pols, these can be tricky waters to navigate. U.S. Attorney Jim Letten has recused himself from the case citing “various relevant factors” which remain unspecified. His first mate will have to be the sacrifice:

One of the arrested men, Robert Flanagan, 24, is the son of William Flanagan, who is the acting U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Louisiana. The other three men include James O’Keefe, 25, a conservative filmaker who made hidden-camera videos at ACORN field offices, and two out-of-state conservative activists: Joseph Basel, 24, and Stan Dai, 24.

Despite Letten’s recusal, the case will not be removed to another jurisdiction… Instead, Letten’s first assistant U.S. attorney, veteran federal prosecutor Jan Mann, will act as the “Attorney for the United States in this matter”…

Flanagan’s attorney last week said that Basel, O’Keefe and his client went to Landrieu’s office in the Hale Boggs federal building in order to make a video showing that the senator’s staff was ignoring phone calls from angry constitutents. Basel and Flanagan were dressed as telephone repairmen, while O’Keefe reportedly filmed the other men’s interaction with his cell phone. Dai remained in a car parked on the street with some kind of listening device.

The four were arrested by U.S. marshals and face charges of entering federal property under false pretenses for the purpose of committing a felony.

Bottom line: Embarrassing a Dem Senator can be twisted into a felony, but all sorts of egregious crimes committed by Dems are O.K.

Related coverage:

Hot Air — U.S. Attorney Recuses Himself from O’Keefe Case

Wake Up America — James O’Keefe And The U.S. Attorney