Given motivation, a hidden camera, editing software and enough time, anyone could create videos showing targets saying almost anything. An edit here and an edit there and you could make it seem that a NASA official said the moon landing was a fraud. Or you could make it seem that the Pope said there is no God.

Such is the work of James O’Keefe and his Breitbart-sponsored pals.

In 2009, O’Keefe released videos purporting to show employees of the community organizing group ACORN giving advice regarding prostitution. Not surprisingly, the group’s political enemies went wild resulting in Congress denying any further funds to the group. Even though the videos were later proven to have been fraudulent and misleading, the news came too late – long after most of the organization’s offices were closed.

Then, in 2015, O’Keefe turned his sights and his hidden cameras on Planned Parenthood, creating another set of highly-edited and misleading videos that seemed to show Planned Parenthood officials offering to purchase and sell baby parts from aborted fetuses. The videos are still reverberating in the blogosphere and among right-wing political pundits causing the GOP-controlled Congress to sponsor legislation aimed at cutting funding for the organization even though O’Keefe’s work was again shown to be fraudulent.

One would think that two such efforts would have relegated O’Keefe to the trash heap of history alongside the likes of Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew, Mark Levin, Rush Limbaugh, Alex Jones and other disreputable right-wing operatives where he could no longer cause harm to well-meaning people and organizations. But he’s back with yet another unscrupulous hit job. This time he’s attempting to show that Democratic officials have engaged in unethical campaign tactics, the promotion of violence and vote rigging leading up to the 2016 presidential election.

In other words, O’Keefe is trying to prove the Democratic Party is guilty of doing the very same things the Republican Party and the Trump campaign are doing!

Yet the comparison is unconvincing. On the one hand, we have some highly-edited videos produced by a known fraudster. On the other hand, we have a long history of GOP efforts to gerrymander legislative and congressional district; of federal court cases surrounding voter suppression efforts by the GOP; of the beatings of protesters caught on video at campaign rallies; of GOP elected officials arbitrarily removing the names of minorities from voter registration lists.