An American Lion

James O’Keefe III, Stan Dai, Robert Flanagan and Joseph Basel.

If you look at that assembled gallery of rogues pictured above and taken just after being arrested for going into a Federal building with the intent to do something untoward to the phone system of a United States Senator, you come away with one impression.

Oh, shit.

As in, fear and panic in the eyes of four young men who were most emphatically not committing a prank.

When you have it in your mind to carry out a prank, that’s your cheerful mindset. You smile and have fun. Clearly, in the photos above, the reality of being arrested and put into bright orange jumpsuits has reduced these four men to the state you see above. Tears? Panic? Terror? I see evidence of all of that. Only the young man at the end, Mr. Basel, has the presence of mind to raise up his chin and chuck it at the camera. Not one smile, not one smirk, not one winky-winky.

That’s what it looks like when you realize you’ve just been caught committing a felony. So much for their prank story.

In any event, the New York Times has done some digging.

James O’Keefe III, the guerrilla videographer, advised conservative students this month that they needed to start taking more risks.

“The more you put yourself out there and you take those calculated risks,” he told the Web site CampusReform.org, which works to foster conservative activism on college campuses, “you’re actually going to get opportunities.”

Just days later, Mr. O’Keefe, 25, took his own advice, but did not get quite the opportunity he expected.

He and three other men — including a 24-year-old associate, Joseph Basel, who was interviewed alongside Mr. O’Keefe by the Web site — were arrested and charged with a federal felony, accused of seeking to tamper with the office telephone system of Senator Mary L. Landrieu, Democrat of Louisiana. Two of them were impersonating repairmen in the senator’s New Orleans office and were caught after being asked for identification.

Mr. O’Keefe said Friday that the four men had been trying to determine whether Ms. Landrieu was avoiding constituent complaints about the Senate health care bill after her phone system was jammed in December. (Her office said no calls had been intentionally avoided.) On reflection, he said in a statement, “I could have used a different approach to this investigation.”

When the Times looked at the background of the case at hand and of these young men, there is revealed in the article an added fifth participant:

And then there was Ben Wetmore, 28, who was not arrested but who allowed Mr. Dai, Mr. O’Keefe and Mr. Basel to stay at his house in New Orleans this month. The authorities have not indicated that Mr. Wetmore, a Loyola law student, was connected to the incident at Ms. Landrieu’s office, but he has nonetheless played a vital role in Mr. O’Keefe’s career, as well as that of Mr. Basel and other activists.

Mr. Wetmore helped introduce many of the activists to one another and inspired them through his take on attention-grabbing tactics. His often behind-the-scenes role was detailed in a trail he left on the Internet, as well as in several interviews.

“Benjamin Wetmore: a mentor of mine; a genius,” Mr. O’Keefe said during an interview with The New York Times in September, after the Acorn videos were released. “He said, ‘Take on the politically correct crowd on campus, satirically.’ ”

Mr. O’Keefe declined several interview requests, and Mr. Wetmore responded to an e-mail message by sending photographs of Jayson Blair, a reporter for The New York Times who resigned after admitting to plagiarism and fabrication. Mr. Dai, Mr. Basel and Mr. Flanagan could not be reached for comment. (The four men arrested were freed on bail, awaiting a pretrial hearing.)

Mr. Wetmore is, apparently, every bit the petulant shithead his friends and newfound associates seem to relish being in public:

Before joining the institute, Mr. Wetmore had established his own bona fides as a college provocateur at American University. He drew national attention after being arrested by the campus police and accused of breaking a prohibition against recording Tipper Gore during a speech she gave there in 2002 and refusing to surrender the tape.

The arrest became a cause célèbre for First Amendment advocates and showcased what would become a standard technique of Mr. Wetmore and his cohort: taping classes, lectures and other campus events in the hopes of catching professors and others in moments of excessive political correctness or other embarrassments. He made headlines again roughly two years later when American University’s president, Benjamin Ladner, unsuccessfully tried to stop Mr. Wetmore from running the Web site BenLadner.com, which was devoted to criticizing him.

Isn’t that just the sort of young man you’d love to marry off to your daughter (Miranda gave me the idea for my headline)? An undercurrent of nastiness, racism, and intolerance seems to be the theme running through their young lives:

[…] if The Centurion delighted fellow conservatives, it frequently left campus liberals flabbergasted. When it published an opinion article titled “The Inequality of Black History Month,” a student, Whitney Pennington, wrote in The Rutgers Daily Targum, “Honestly, in responding to this article, I do not even know where to begin.”

Tabitha Rice, who was in the College Democrats at Rutgers and who had numerous run-ins with Mr. O’Keefe, described him as “insufferable.”

“He always would do something that would get a rise, but he always knows how to work the system,” she said.

Around the same time, Mr. Wetmore wrote on his blog about a visit with another recipient of a Leadership Institute grant, Mr. Basel, who used the money to start his newspaper, The Counterweight.

Among Mr. Basel’s stunts was one in which he put up posters all over his campus in Minnesota that said “End Racism & Sexism Now: Kill All White Males.” The posters prompted such an outcry that he was asked to speak at a campus forum, where, according to two students, he asked why everyone could not use racial epithets the way black rappers do. Many black students walked out.

How appalling. It’s one thing to be allowed to say such things; it is entirely another to go around pretending to be entitled to say such things. Really, no one talks about the bond market anymore? No one talks about tax cuts, the military, or values? Young Republicans are reduced to race baiting and trying to play to the lowest common denominator? Such things have no place in a polite society. Win with your ideas and your classy behavior, or go home.

There is another participant here, and that would be one Andrew Breitbart, an associate of Matt Drudge and quite the character himself. After O’Keefe carried out a campaign against Planned Parenthood, Breitbart picked up on the young man’s work:

The campaign caught the eye of Andrew Breitbart, a conservative Web publisher and a former editor of The Drudge Report. In an interview, he said he had admired the Planned Parenthood campaign but did not know who was behind it until Mr. O’Keefe approached him with the Acorn project.

Mr. Breitbart likened Mr. O’Keefe’s approach to that of Abbie Hoffman and Hunter S. Thompson. His business arrangement with Mr. O’Keefe to run the videos on his Big Government site is widely credited with giving them national exposure, and making Mr. O’Keefe a star of his movement.

Really? A comparison to Thompson seems like the height of absurdity. Let’s not forget—these four stumblebums carried out one of the most ridiculous sting operations ever attempted, and failed by being incompetent while somehow being too stupid to dress the part and get away with it. The rest is history. Ten years in Federal Prison might cure these young men of their shitheadedness, but who really thinks it will come to that?