by Audrey Hudson
Politicians and their supporters use interesting tactics to intimidate and silence their critics, from rumor-mongering to editorial cartoons, even dueling pistols.
But the target of a high-profile lawsuit who is also a relentless investigator of the Obama administration says the judicial system is being used to retaliate against him.
“The President of the United States has an unprecedented and uncanny desire to silence those who report the truth about him,” says media mogul Andrew Breitbart.
Breitbart first came under fire last year after posting a video on one of his websites of a speech given by an Agriculture Department employee during an NAACP conference. The speech, Breitbart said, elicited racist responses from the audience. The speaker, Shirley Sherrod, says she was then fired at the behest of the White House, but when she was offered her job back days later, she declined.
Rather than targeting the administration for its actions, or accepting its peace offer of what appeared to be a better job, Sherrod is suing Breitbart in the District of Columbia Superior Court for defamation of character and emotional distress.
Breitbart concedes that Obama is “noticeably absent” from the lawsuit, but says it is part of a pattern of isolation and intimidation that is being orchestrated by the Obama White House that threatens to marginalize media critics through the courts.
Exhibit A, he says, is the law firm of Kirkland & Ellis that is representing Sherrod.
“All you have to do is look at who Kirkland Ellis is and where their money went in the 2008 election cycle,” Breitbart said.
Through employee donations, Kirkland Ellis was a top 20 contributor to Obama’s presidential campaign, with nearly $494,000 in donations, according to Wikipedia.
“This is a man who wants to shut out and silence his enemies,” Breitbart told HUMAN EVENTS.
“The courts are a lovely place to take away the energy and resources of the President’s critics,” Breitbart said. “He thinks he can use the courts as a war of attrition against his political enemies.”
Exhibit B, Breitbart says, is how the Left used the apparatus of the mainstream media to target other enemies, such as author David Freddoso and commentator Stanley Kurtz.
Freddoso, who wrote The Case Against Barack Obama, a New York Times best seller, “was called a hack, and whatever else they could think of,” Matthew Vadum, a senior editor at Capital Research Center tells HUMAN EVENTS.
In an American Spectator article Vadum penned during the campaign season, he outlined an Obama campaign memo he obtained urging followers to stir up trouble for Freddoso.
"The author of the latest anti-Barack hit book is appearing on WGN Radio in the Chicagoland market tonight, and your help is urgently needed to make sure his baseless lies don't gain credibility," the memo said.
"David Freddoso has made a career off dishonest, extreme hate-mongering. And WGN apparently thinks this card-carrying member of the right-wing smear machine needs a bigger platform for his lies and smears about Barack Obamao—n the public airwaves."
Kurtz says he was also the target of “Alinskyite tactics” during a Chicago radio show appearance in 2008.
“The Obama campaign tried to shut me down when I went onto a radio station,” Kurtz told a Hudson Institute audience that same year. “About half an hour before I got there, they had been called by 7,000 people demanding that I not be allowed on the air. So they called the Obama folks and invited them to have someone come on to debate me. They refused, demanded that I not be allowed on the radio, and then they asked for the name of the head of the station so they could call and demand that I not be allowed in the radio. They did the same thing to David Freddoso. These are Alinskyite tactics, and Obama is using them in the campaign,” Kurtz said.
Vadum told HUMAN EVENTS that “leftist radicals don’t really like free speech unless it goes their way.” The courts, it appears, are their final option to shut down the opposition.
“When they don’t like what you stand for, they want the police to harass you or they take you to court. That’s not supposed to happen in a constitutional Republic like the United States,” Vadum said.
“This is thug politics straight out of Chicago,” Vadum said. “Al Capone would have been pleased.”
Exhibit C is the so-called Pigford settlement. Breitbart says it is the most controversial story he has ever uncovered.
What initially started out as Breitbart’s mission to defend the Tea Party against attacks of racism by the NAACP has now evolved into a mission to expose how federal payments to black farmers for racial discrimination in farm aid has been hijacked as a reparations movement.
“This is about politics, this is about my continued attempts to expose the rotten-to-the-core alliances of the alleged objectivity of the mainstream media and organized groups like the NAACP who have gone to war against the Tea Party for its attempts to bring fiscal responsibility to an out-of-control government,” Breitbart said.
“And I am being attacked because of my effectiveness in exposing how the President’s propaganda is being created. And I am being attacked because I have been a relentless force in reporting and propagating narratives that show that hope and change have been nothing more than organized thuggery and false propaganda,” Breitbart said.
Audrey Hudson is an award-winning investigative journalist who specializes in homeland security.
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