About Breitbart’s “bombshell” Obama video …

Pictured: RADICAL

Assuming you’re aware of conservative propagandist Andrew Breitbart’s recent passing, you may have heard about those supposed “Obama tapes” he was preparing for release with the promise of providing some insight into the President’s allegedly “radical” years in college. Well, as anyone remotely aware of Breitbart’s lame-duck track record might have guessed, it turns out his “bombshell” was, predictably enough, a complete dud:

As President of the Harvard Law Review in the spring of his final year there, 1991, he aligned himself with Professor Derrick Bell's dramatic protest for diversity on the faculty of Harvard Law School.

Bell was the first black tenured professor at the school, and a pioneer of "critical race theory," which insisted, controversially, on reading issues of race and power into legal scholarship. His protest that spring was occasioned by Harvard's denial of tenure to a black woman professor, Regina Austin, at a time when only three of the law school's professors were black and only five women. He told Harvard he would take a leave of absence — a kind of academic strike — "until a woman of color is offered and accepted a tenured position on this faculty," and he launched a hunger strike to dramatize his point.

Obama was a major figure on campus, the first black president of the Law Review. Some friends, in a prescient joke, just referred to him as "the first black president." He had a reputation as a conciliatory figure, not a confrontational one like Bell.

That’s right: Law-student Barack Obama was such a radical Leftist that he … spoke in conciliation at a peaceful protest to support a professor who wanted minority groups such as Blacks and women to be granted tenure like anyone else. Very dramatic, I’m sure.

Oh, but there must’ve been something about it, or else why would Breitbart have been keeping those tapes to himself until he saw fit to release them? Well, no, there wasn’t. And we know that because the full footage has already been available online for years:

Money quote from PBS: "It’s been online at our site and on YouTube since [2008]." Another reader:

All that video proves to me is Obama was a good public speaker even 21 years ago, while he was still a student. With no teleprompter.

I only have two things to say: 1) It’s almost freaky how little Obama’s voice and demeanor have changed in two decades; and 2) Andrew Breitbart somehow pulled off the miracle (if one may call it that) of making himself look even more foolish even after he died.

(via Rob F)

Tags: Barack Obama • Andrew Breitbart • Harvard Law School • Derrick Bell