While Liberals gleefully celebrate the arrest of investigative journalist James O’Keefe, Conservatives are wringing their hands. The most telling thing I see about this, is that the young man has not even been convicted and the Left and Right have prejudiced this man for their own reasons.

For the Liberals, it’s easy. He shed light on ACORN‘s corruption. He made fools out of his targets, and his work helped lead Congress to withdraw funding (if but symbolically) for this organization. They have a vendetta.

For the Conservatives, it’s easy. We need to distance ourselves from this man for fear of guilt by association. Screams of “Louisiana Watergate” have left us quaking in our boots. “Shit,” we cry, as the momentum of the worst two weeks for Democrats comes to an abrupt, shrieking halt. We have reputations to protect.

Los Angeles Prosecutor Patterico knows something about jumping to conclusions:

Look: I wasn’t there and I therefore don’t know what happened. But O’Keefe has a history of goofy, humorous, over-the-top undercover stunts to make a political point. Wiretapping doesn’t seem like his style. And the facts in the affidavit — especially the lack of reference anywhere to any listening devices in the possession of anyone in the building — suggest to me that’s not what he was doing.

The Conservative handwringing is bullshit. So far I’m the third person I know who is giving James O’Keefe the benefit of the doubt. The second is an Althouse commenter. Volokh:

It’s one thing to pretend to be a pimp when interviewing ACORN employees. It’s quite another to pretend to be a telephone repairman to gain access to a U.S. Senate office and its telephone system.

It really is different. The way I see it, it’s actually better and more justifiable to bug a US Senator than it is to spycam an ACORN office. The corrupt ACORN employees are civilians, and they were being recorded by other civilians. Mary Landrieu is an elected official and an arm of the US government, and as such is a “public official” whose rights to privacy are more limited than your typical civilian.

This is different from Nixon’s Watergate Hotel break-ins because the bugging was at the behest of a public official, a person in power no less than the President, acting against an association of private individuals. Civilians have to have the power to resonably violate the privacy of elected officials* and especially their appointed underlings. It’s for this reason that the Office Of The POTUS releases correspondence with civilians as a matter of public record. It was this same problem that our current president faced when they had to wrest his BlackBerry from his grubby clutches.

Even from a Kantian standpoint of certain actions being truly immoral no matter the circumstances, the Conservatives’ despair because he “did something stupid.” Shit, we don’t even know exactly what he did! Secondly, it seems the only moral standard these whiny Conservatives is that it’s against the law. Have we forgotten that what is legal is not always moral; what is proscribed is not always evil? The repudiation from Conservatives is indicative of a lack of desire to fight on the side of one’s allies. Lastly, this is a pattern of behavior for a number of Conservative pundits. They all-too-quickly judge one of their own and distance themselves before all the facts are in.

Liberals have shown more faith in cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal than Conservatives shown this boy. They stood through thick and thin with the corrupt employees at ACORN and in so doing reduced O’Keefe’s victory to a symbolic one. It’s one thing to follow advice from one’s enemies. It’s another to learn a thing or two by observing them.

* – I understand the possibility of the shoe being on the other foot. My test of reasonability lies in the physical and mental territories around which politicans move. A home, a hacked email account or in the case of Mme. Palin, one broken into thanks to a weak password, do not really count as “reasonable” because these are not in the public purview. I also understand that this idea is extreme and unimplementible since Senators handle important national security information, the essence has to be that elected officials should be afraid of the public, not the other way around.