James O’Keefe, the conservative activist filmmaker who rose to national prominence after he captured on film ACORN employees advising persons posing as a prostitute and pimp on best practices for trafficking in child prostitution, was arrested Tuesday for a failed caper at the office of Louisiana Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu.

O’Keefe and three accomplices aimed to wiretap Landrieu’s phones, but the ACORN antagonist’s ill-conceived plot ran afoul when a Government Services Agency (GSA) employee asked for the men’s credentials, who, of course, were unable to provide them. The four, according to an FBI affidavit, were charged with entering federal property under false pretenses with the objective of committing a felony.

The cavalcade of partisan-tinged responses from Democrats–each more crass than the last, though equally revisionist–are symptomatic of an ideology bereft of intellectual honesty. Whereas Republicans openly criticized the one-time rising conservative star O’Keefe, Democrats doggedly insist the ‘unoffending’ community organizers are innocent – despite unassailable evidence proving otherwise.

Contrary to the narrative ACORN allies are so keen on supplanting, O’Keefe has found little to no support from those conservatives who once hailed his work as unbelievably courageous. O’Keefe erred, in part, because he became what he was targeting, conservative columnist Michelle Malkin said on her website.

On MSNBC’s “Hardball with Chris Matthews,” former Reagan adviser Pat Buchanan characterized tampering with Landrieu’s phones as “an absurd action.” “Look, we’re hearing from David [Corn], ‘We hope the right-wing covers this.’ I’m sure the right-wing will give this a little more coverage […] than the left-wing gave to the ACORN scandal,” Buchanan said, underscoring a point many Democrats would prefer to discount in the coming days.

Democrats, who benefitted by untold sums over the years from ACORN’s voter registration campaigns, quickly called into question O’Keefe’s scruples as means by which to exonerate the now-tainted community organizing group.

Democratic responses ran the gambit from sensational and melodramatic to deranged and preposterous.

Louisiana Democratic Party Chair Michael McHale equated Tuesday’s events with the infamous burglary of the Democratic National Committee headquarters by GOP operatives, saying in a statement that O’Keefe’s actions constituted “a Louisiana Watergate.” The comparison is found lacking, of course, when one considers that O’Keefe and his compatriots were acting of their own accord and were not emissaries of the official Republican Party apparatus.

And despite casually dismissing O’Keefe’s ACORN exposé last September as the inane musings of a rabid conservative, the liberal blog DailyKos demanded an “immediate, aggressive open investigation” of the filmmaker’s Louisiana exploits. If O’Keefe’s antics go unanswered, the tortured logic held, America may yet be on the cusp of another domestic terrorist attack.

“The last time right-wing terrorist nuts were ignored two of them ending [sic] up blowing up a building in Oklahoma City and killed 168 innocent people including 19 children,” wrote the delusional and copy-editing challenged DailyKos blogger.

ACORN’s chief executive Bertha Lewis, who reemerged after months of lurking in the shadows, recited those talking points already refined by liberal bloggers and commentators. O’Keefe’s arrest, she said in a statement, “is further evidence of his disregard for the law in pursuit of his extremist agenda.”

The organization’s official Twitter account, which has been dormant for the previous six weeks but resumed active posting yesterday in the hopes of stirring the pot, also commented on the arrest, writing that it “couldn’t have happened to a more deserving soul.” That “deserving soul,” for those keeping track, was made such for exposing ACORN’s corruption and complicity in child prostitution and tax evasion.

While no Republicans rushed to O’Keefe’s aid in the hours following the bungled caper, it was virtually mandated of Democratic surrogates that they defend ACORN in the days and weeks following the infamous sting. For Democrats, it is, ultimately, preferable to cursorily omit their own indiscretions if it means amplifying those of their rivals.

How amusing it is that ACORN, who once argued O’Keefe’s investigative work was wholly undeserving of media attention, is most aggressively propagandizing the news of his arrest.