What, you're still here?

Sadly, the odious Andrew Breitbart continues to defile the national dialogue, even from beyond the grave.

Fortunately, what he's done seems to be remarkably ineffective.

You may remember the back story. Shortly before his death, in one of his overheated public appearances, Breitbart claimed that he had video of Barack Obama when he was in college that was going to be some kind of major game changer. “I have videos, this election we’re going to vet him,” Breitbart disclosed to raucous applause. “We are going to vet him from his college days to show you why racial division and class warfare are central to what hope and change was sold in 2008.”

Well, even after death Breitbart's organization continues, and apparently today they got scooped. We know that because when the tape was finally released they called it "selectively edited". "Spliced and diced." Well, duh. We knew that would be the case: after the Shirley Sherrod libel, if not before, the whole world knew that everything that came out of the Breitbart organization was sliced and diced. The weird thing is that they admitted it.

Because they got scooped they spent the afternoon talking about how they were going to release the whole tape on Hannitty tonight, and that it would (naturally) blow the whole story up and demolish President Obama's story, or appeal, or something. They kept the Breitbart web page plastered with hints about what we're going to find out when the whole thing is released.

I don't know if the whole video has been released, but it seems as though it has, and there's nothing there, folks. For one thing, it was all on Frontline back when Obama was running for President, so nothing has been "hidden". It's video of a demonstration at Harvard Law School when Obama was there (not from his college days) and it shows Obama speaking in support of Derrick Bell, a prominent law professor there who was a bit of a lightning rod at the time. Obama sounds remarkably the way he sounds today, with the same measured tone, the same tendency to use a falling intonation at the end of sentences, and the same use of language that we hear from him now. What's more, he doesn't say anything that remarkable.

To hear the Breitbart people tell it the tape is totally damning, supposedly because they're now going to release all this video that proves that Bell is a racist or something, but there is literally nothing in this video that makes Obama look much different from what we already know about him.

Another thing that we keep seeing on the Breitbart site is their claims that Charles Ogletree, a professor at Harvard, told them on an "exclusive tape", that “We hid this throughout the 2008 campaign. I don’t care if they find it now.” And they say that several times, with hot links to pages where they promise you're going to find the story of this exclusive tape with Charles Ogletree saying what they claim he said. Don't bother. No matter how many of those links you follow you never get to the tape they promise.

So what's their final line? There’s far more coming on Derrick Bell. This is just the beginning. And this video is a smoking gun showing that Barack Obama not only associated with radicals, he was their advocate.

Now it's been a long time since anyone with a brain took anything from Breitbart seriously, but that didn't stop him or his people from continuing to peddle anything he could. At this point, though, can't we just agree that he is both gone and forgotten?