Several days ago, I said all of this on Twitter, to the delight of many who found the passage as humorous as I do. At the time, I saved a screenshot, fearing that the piece would be changed or taken down, but I needn't have worried. Normal journalistic impulses don't really apply at Breitbart.

No harm done in this instance. But the Andrew Breitbart-inspired, averse-to-correction mode of journalism isn't always so innocuous, as I was reminded yesterday when I saw that Juan Carlos Vera's name was back in the headlines. I haven't written about him for some time, but if you're looking for the most indefensible thing that happened when Andrew Breitbart worked with James O'Keefe, this is worth revisiting.

There's finally good news to report.

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Juan Carlos Vera worked at an ACORN office in San Diego. One day, O'Keefe and Hannah Giles walked in with a hidden video camera and pretended to be a pimp and prostitute as part of a sting meant to prove that some of ACORN's employees were depraved leftists.

They asked Vera for help smuggling underage girls across the Mexican border so that they could work in a brothel. Confronted with what appeared to be a sex-trafficking plot, you'd hope that someone in Vera's position would play along, get as much information as possible, and call the police.

And guess what?

That's exactly what Vera did.

Unbeknownst to O'Keefe or Giles, he called his cousin, a police officer, shortly after they left his office. Perhaps you know what happened next. Internet entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart published the ACORN hidden videos, which exposed some actual instances of bad behavior at the organization, but also turned out to be egregiously misleading to the millions who watched them.

This is true of a lot of the ACORN videos.

But the San Diego ACORN video was particularly misleading. O'Keefe produced, and Breitbart published and publicized, videos that made an innocent man look as if he was complicit in a would-be plot to traffic underage girls across the border. They didn't do this on purpose. Still, it happened.

And it cost the guy his job:

A man fired from ACORN's San Diego-area office for discussing human smuggling with a fake pimp and prostitute reported the incident to police two days after it happened, according to information released by the police. Juan Carlos Vera was fired by ACORN after a videotape was aired on Fox News showing him discussing with a couple posed as a pimp and a prostitute the best ways to smuggle underage prostitutes into the U.S. from El Salvador. "It's better if it's in Tijuana," Vera is heard saying in the video. "Because I have a lot of contacts in Tijuana." But police said in a press release that Vera reported the incident to his cousin, a detective with the National City Police Department. Vera worked in ACORN's National City office. The detective contacted a federal task force that deals with human smuggling, and an officer from the task force asked for more details.

After making Vera look like an eager would-be sex trafficker, what did Breitbart and O'Keefe do when it was reported that he had in fact called the police? What did they do when the California Attorney General investigated the case and affirmed as much? Did they append a correction to the story and apologize? Did they do what they could to give this man back his reputation?