In an interview with POLITICO, Andrew Breitbart (left) blasted Rachel Maddow as an intellectually dishonest, left-wing propagandist. Breitbart blasts Maddow at CPAC

Rachel Maddow has sharply judged the arrested activist filmmaker behind the so-called ACORN pimp videos, and on Thursday, the conservative media entrepreneur who posted the videos fired back.

In an interview with POLITICO on the sidelines of the Conservative Political Action Conference, Andrew Breitbart blasted Maddow as an intellectually dishonest, left-wing propagandist who personifies the shortcomings of an antiquated media business model.


Maddow, Breitbart said, drastically distorted the arrest of one of the ACORN filmmakers last month during an unrelated attempted exposé of Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.).

Asked what he would say if he ran into Maddow, an unabashedly liberal MSNBC host who made a surprise appearance at CPAC on Thursday, Breitbart said, “I hope to see you and give you a lovely hug because you validated my hopes and aspirations and my business model because you’re so bad at what you do.”

Breitbart accused Maddow of being “part of a propaganda campaign to attack the last president ... and make him out to be the worst human being that ever walked the face of the earth. And, at the same time, you promoted Barack Obama as the greatest thing that ever walked the earth.”

Plus, he ripped Maddow and other liberal commentators for their treatment of the populist conservative tea party movement and one of its champions, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.

“The left’s Alinsky tactics — that’s you Rachel Maddow — of isolating Sarah Palin or her poor children and beating on them, beating on them, beating on them ... [won’t succeed] with the tea party movement. ...You can call them racists and homophobes. But those tricks aren’t working anymore, because people are saying, 'This is ridiculous.’”

Alana Russo, a spokesman for Maddow, disputed Breitbart’s accusations. “I'm not sure what he could possibly be referring to,” she said. “I would defy you to find some instance of Rachel launching an ad hominem attack on Sarah Palin or her kids.”

On her show, Maddow has been sharply critical of both Palin and the tea party movement – just as Breitbart has repeatedly attacked Obama and Democrats in his media appearances.

Maddow’s style tends to be more ironic, but can often come off as inflammatory. On her Feb. 5 show, for example, she suggested that attendees at the National Tea Party Convention in Nashville, which was underway at the time, were wearing “white hoods.”

Breitbart, a disciple of hugely influential conservative news aggregator Matt Drudge, has been particularly aggressive in pushing against the coverage by Maddow and others on MSNBC of self-styled activist journalist James O’Keefe.

Breitbart’s Big Government website posted videos secretly recorded by O’Keefe and his partner, Hannah Giles, who posed as a pimp and a prostitute while soliciting advice from employees of ACORN, the liberal community-organizing group, on how to set up a brothel. The videos, which resulted in a congressional vote to stop federal funding for the group before a federal judge ordered the funding restored, made stars of O’Keefe and Giles.

And Breitbart, who is paying O’Keefe to produce more videos, has been particularly critical of the media’s descriptions of the circumstances of O’Keefe’s arrest last month, along with three other men, after they entered Landrieu’s New Orleans district office.

Several media outlets falsely reported that O’Keefe and his crew were charged with attempting to wiretap Landrieu’s phones, and on her show, Maddow, citing another news outlet’s report, asserted the four were installing “bugs” in Landrieu’s phones and that “listening devices ... found in a car a couple of blocks away ... could pick [up] transmissions from those bugs.”

She then asked a guest she cited as an expert in “the manipulation of phone systems for political gain” whether that “sound[s] like the kind of thing that would be part of a political dirty tricks campaign or does this sound like a freelance operation?”

According to an FBI affidavit, O’Keefe entered Landrieu’s office with two other men who were pretending to be telephone repairmen, with the two attempting to manipulate telephones while O’Keefe filmed them on his cell phone camera and a fourth man waited outside.

The four men were charged with entering federal property under false pretenses with the intent of committing a felony.

Russo said that Maddow later clarified that the O’Keefe arrest was not a phone taping case, as Maddow said it “initially seemed to be.” She added that Maddow and MSNBC “reported the story as it broke, citing sources, updating it as new information became available.”

Breitbart said the media failed in its watchdog function by letting ACORN off easy and instead “falsely framed James and these other gentlemen. And, because the mainstream media wanted to destroy James for what he successfully did in the ACORN exposé, they so overreached.”

Mocking MSNBC and Maddow — who said on her show that O’Keefe “is a paid contributor to a right-wing Drudge Report spinoff website” — Breitbart said, “I being the organizer of the federal break-in of Mary Landrieu’s office, where I paid millions of dollars to James O’Keefe to break in there. That was a terrific story, great reporting there, MSNBC.”

MSNBC did not, in fact, report that Breitbart paid O’Keefe millions of dollars.

Breitbart asserted “there is more video that is going to come out” and predicted “the media that tried to defeat James O’Keefe and to destroy him, in their attempts to do that, they weaponized him and made him a bigger figure than he otherwise would become, and so the next videos that come from him and his cohorts [are] going to be that much more devastating.”