Bob Schneider’s “Chinatown” is a creepy atmospheric slice of noir pop, and this might be my favorite version, performed live in a room somewhere.

From the album, Songs Sung and Played on Guitar at the Same Time.

There’s a mad wind blowin down the ninety nine
And the ghosts of New York City they all doin’ just fine
When that little Smith and Wesson went and lit up the night
All she showed when she heard were her cold pearly whites

None of them kisses dropped down in the hole
While the midnight sun played the starring role
Was gonna turn around that black Cadillac
Filled with little white rails, just the cold hard facts

So when you done dancing
And the rain slows down
We’ll all meet up at Eddie’s over in Chinatown

Think you got the answers but you got it all wrong
The day’s too short and the nights are way too long
Wake up to find your whole world falling apart
In a fifty dollar dress over a broken heart

Dig in the dirt while you’re dancin’ with the dogs
Rollin’ around lost in a fog
Bangin’ on tomorrow like a big black drum
Kick your head back, spit at the sun

So when you done dancing
And the rain slows down
We’ll all meet up at Eddie’s over in Chinatown
We’ll all meet up at Eddie’s over in Chinatown

There’s fifty on the table, there’s trouble down the line
There’s 200,000 dollars nobody’s ever gonna find
You know you’ll never see her come a-walking through the door
The bars about to close and the sky’s about to pour

You take your last slug as you stumble out into the street
Pull out your gun and you whisper trick or treat
And as you pull the trigger beyond a shadow of a doubt
You hear her sayin’ your name and the light’s goin’ out

So when you done dancing
And the rain slows down
We’ll all meet up at Eddie’s over in Chinatown
We’ll all meet up at Eddie’s over in Chinatown
We’ll all meet up at Eddie’s over in Chinatown

When Andrew Breitbart passed away, the editors and bloggers who made his “Big” sites what they are today swore a blood oath to carry on his legacy of devastating BOMBSHELL stings, and their inept fumbling attempts to do so have produced a classic week of wingnut comedy.

Feeding the Media

When he had a hit job ready to launch, one of Breitbart’s techniques was to release it in stages a day or so apart, instead of dumping everything out there at once. This technique is what made his (and James O’Keefe’s) ACORN sting videos so effective; you might have been able to say one was an isolated incident, and two a coincidence, but when they just kept coming, and each one seemed more incriminating than the last, it had an undeniable effect. Even Jon Stewart once did a sketch very critical of ACORN, giving total credence to the videos. (We now know that much of what we saw in those videos had been edited and manipulated to create exactly this effect, the first example of what became known as “Breitbarting.”)

Breitbart didn’t try to conceal this “cascading bombshells” tactic, he bragged about it openly, and compared it to “feeding the media” like dogs so they’d keep coming back for more.

And that’s what we saw the mini-Breits trying to emulate this week, with the BOMBSHELL revelation that 21 years ago, Barack Obama hugged a famous black professor.

Stage One: The Dreaded Alinsky Play

The first stage, to set the scene and prep the media dogs to expect more, was released on Sunday evening so it would get into the beginning of the weekly news cycle: the revelation that Barack Obama had once attended a play about community organizer Saul Alinsky. It was a nothing-burger, but people who knew how Breitbart worked knew there would soon be more.

Stage Two: The Angry Black Radical

The second stage was the video of Obama introducing Prof. Derrick Bell, accompanied by a campaign to paint Bell as a dangerous angry black radical. Unfortunately for the heirs of Andrew, they got scooped on this one by Buzzfeed, who released the video shortly before Breitbart.com did.

Stage Three: The Sinister Conspiracy

The third stage of the BOMBSHELL was supposed to be the tiny snippet of video they posted, showing Prof. Charles Ogletree saying, “Of course we hid this throughout the 2008 campaign.” This was going to be their proof that not only was President Obama a dangerous angry black radical, he was also part of a conspiracy to hide his angry black radical connections.

Boom!

But then, it all went horribly wrong.

The multi-stage BOMBSHELL blew up in their own faces, because although Prof. Derrick Bell’s “Critical Race Theory” is certainly controversial, picturing him as an angry radical was never going to fly. As the first tenured black law professor at Harvard, Bell dedicated his life to understanding and fighting against racism; some would argue with his theories and analysis, but he lived an honorable, thoughtful, exemplary life and left the world a better, more interesting place when he died.

The third stage of the BOMBSHELL, the short video clip that supposedly caught Prof. Ogletree admitting to a roomful of people that he’d participated in a conspiracy to usurp the office of the Presidency, turned out to be a laughable attempt at deceptive editing — literally laughable, because Ogletree was actually making a joke. The longer clip we posted at LGF shows that he was referring to the people in the video looking much older than they did in 1991, and joking that he “hid the video” to keep them from getting mad at him.

And that dreaded Alinsky play never made it into the mainstream news at all.

One of the Biggest Internet Screwups Ever

But the coup de grace, the cheese that completes this half-pound hamburger of right wing fail, was our exclusive scoop that when they redesigned Breitbart.com, Andrew’s brain trust actually succeeded in breaking every single one of the millions of links to their websites that had been posted on the Internet before this week.

The links are all still broken as I write this. Every link to a “Big” site on every website and search engine in the world. All broken.

Related:
Everything Is Different Now - the Breitbartocalypse Is Upon Us
The Breitbartocalypse Continues - Communists Are Hiding the Video!
Video: Obama Protesting at Harvard in 1991
In Possibly Most Ironic Thing Ever, Breitbart.com Claims Obama Harvard Tape ‘Selectively Edited’
PBS Posts Full Archived 1991 Obama Harvard Video
Breitbart Brain Trust Completely Destroys Own Websites
Soledad O’Brien on Breitbart’s Bombshell: ‘Where’s the Bombshell?’
Breitbart.com Caught Again: Deceptively Editing a Video
Prof. Ogletree: I Was Joking About Obama Video Clip
No, Prof. Derrick Bell Did Not Visit the White House in 2010

And today, the Heritage Foundation tries to jump on the Breitbart.com bandwagon, with another BOMBSHELL post screaming that Derrick A. Bell Visited the White House Twice in 2010!!!

Just two little problems with this absurd attempt at “connecting the dots:” 1) it was a tour of the White House, not a meeting with the President, and 2) it wasn’t Harvard Law Prof. Derrick Bell, but someone with the same name.

Apart from that, BOMBSHELL!

Did Professor Derrick Bell Visit the White House?

There are two problems with the Heritage post. One: it excludes some details from the visitors’ logs. There are 28 columns on the publicly released records, the Heritage blog lists seven. The data they omit includes a description of what the visit was four: in this case, for both visits: TOURS. A White House tour – not MEETING or APPOINTMENT. Another data point: TOTAL PEOPLE. This is a reference to how many people were present for the tour, meeting or appointment – in this case 304 people and 282 people.

Check out the visitors’ logs HERE.

But Bell surely could have taken a tour or two and then met with President Obama, right? Sure, it’s possible – and I asked the White House about it. The answer from a White House official: this was not the same Derrick A. Bell. He one had a different birthday than the late law professor, whose birthday was November 6, 1930. That would seem to undermine the significance of this visit.

It’s difficult to understand why it should be even slightly controversial that a renowned Harvard academic, the first tenured black law professor in the history of the school, would visit the White House.

The true reason for this claim: it plays into right wing race-baiting memes and right wing “academic traitor” memes. The fact that it’s just false doesn’t stop these people from pushing it out there anyway; the right long ago stopped caring whether their smears contain any truth.

Prof. Bell is a perfect target for these cowardly snake oil salesmen, because he’s no longer alive to fight back.

The heirs to Andrew at Breitbart.com just continue to lie about Prof. Charles Ogletree, in a pitiful attempt to shore up their failed BOMBSHELL revelation. They’re still claiming that Ogletree “admitted” hiding the dreaded Harvard video — even though: 1) it wasn’t hidden at all; it was posted on YouTube in October 2008, and also on the PBS website, and 2) Prof. Ogletree did not “admit” to anything; he was joking, as LGF author “Tundra Boy” pointed out yesterday in a great LGF Page with video proof.

Today, in response to this absurd and wholly dishonest smear, Prof. Ogletree tells the Boston Herald what’s already obvious to anyone who watches more than the deceptive excerpt posted by Breitbart.com: Ogletree: I Was Joking About Obama Video Clip.

Harvard Law Professor Charles Ogletree told the Herald he was just kidding when he suggested that a decades-old clip of a young Barack Obama praising and embracing controversial Professor Derrick Bell was kept hidden from voters during the 2008 campaign.

“It was a big joke,” Ogletree said. “If you watch the tape, the audience is laughing when I’m laughing.”

Conservative website Breitbart.com, a week after the death of its founder Andrew Breitbart, posted the video online yesterday, offering it as proof of Obama’s radicalism, arguing Bell had close ties to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Breitbart.com also claimed Obama taught Bell’s writings at the University of Chicago. Breitbart.com called it “the latest in a pattern of Barack Obama’s associations with individuals who promoted a racially divisive America.”

“It’s much to do about nothing,” said Ogletree, who insisted the clip has been public for years. “It’s not the breaking story that some who want to criticize the president claim it is.”

This truly has been a week of monumental failures for the mini-Breitbarts. About now, they might be needing a hug.