From today’s Politico:

The Democratic National Committee is seeking “Macaca” moments. The party today is opening a website, www.accountabilityproject.com, designed to recruit and display embarrassing audio and video of Republican candidates, as well as information about their schedules and copies of their mailers.

Campaigns have long made videotapes of each other, using “trackers” who follow the opposition from event to event. It was a young tracker who shot the video footage of then-Sen. George Allen (R-Va.) that wound up sinking his campaign.

The DNC hopes campaigns and journalists will use the footage in ads and news coverage. The site targets both 2010 candidates and 2012 hopefuls.

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Rep. Bob Etheridge’s assault of student videographers clearly hit a nerve with the American public. The video of his attack was the most watched video on YouTube yesterday. How to explain that?

For months, the legacy media and national Democrats have struggled to convince the public that the Tea Party movement was a dark harbinger of violence. Yet, all acts of violence and intimidation have come from the left. We’ve seen-and reported-these events, but the Etheridge video encapsulated it better than any other. We have a political class. They don’t like criticism and have a general disdain for the American public. Today, though, we have tools to hold them accountable.

Big Government Editor Mike Flynn joined Sean Hannity last night to discuss the Etheridge video and the fall-out from the assault.

The next time someone asks you to explain “the politics of personal destruction,” use this example: Video surfaces of a United States Congressman attacking a college student, grabbing him by the wrist, neck, and body, and assaulting another student’s camera.  The U.S. Representative refuses to immediately release the first student despite the student’s repeated pleas.  You are an official of that Congressman’s political party.  How do you respond?  You attack the publisher of a website that released the video.  Behold, from Politico’s Ben Smith:

A national Democratic Party official e-mailed around a set of talking points about an hour ago, under the subject heading, “Etheridge Gotcha Video Background.”

Democrats are seeking to raise questions about the video, which first appeared on Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government, because of what’s widely viewed as the media’s mishandling of the ACORN story, which emerged without context from edited videos. In particular, party officials say the video was likely taken by a tracker for the Republican Party, which would explain the effort taken to conceal his identity.

From the talking points:

Push hard w/ blogs the lack of credibility inherent to anything Breitbart does/posts, given its role in the debunked ACORN videos:

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