Take a look at these two photographs. One depicts a slimy, pitiful creature that survives solely by slithering its sticky, nauseating little self into the private confines of superior organisms and sucking away their vital fluids. The other, of course, is a common leech.

Conservative “activist” James O’Keefe is the same little snot you knew from high school who wiggled and squirmed and advanced his way onto your unsuspecting girlfriend during the brief intervals when he wasn’t picking the 300 pimples that proliferated on his face like some alien fungus.

O’Keefe, who fancies himself a muckraker in the vein of Upton Sinclair and Ida Tarbell, is best known for exposing the evils of such heinous organizations as the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now (ACORN); the secret Nazi, child-slaughtering regime Planned Parenthood; and, the nefarious black hole of horror itself, National Public Radio.

Like O’Keefe, Sinclair also had a knack for whipping up a clever disguise and plunging himself headlong into morally-reprehensible environments.

The Pulitzer prize-winning author once spent 7 weeks undercover to investigate the rampant corruption of the American meatpacking industry during the early 20th century. Sinclair witnessed the capitalism in its most unrestrained, loathsome form: nauseatingly-corrupt politicians; impoverished laborers working 18-hour days in despicable conditions; and the heartbreaking hopelessness to which nearly all working-class families had succumbed. Yet in 1906 he published The Jungle, which exposed this treachery and ultimately impelled Congress to pass the Pure Food and Drug Act and other progressive legislation several months later.

O’Keefe is no Sinclair. In Planned Parenthood, O’Keefe saw an organization that ran contrary to his own personal ideology; his “undercover” work merely served as a vehicle through which he could expose the organization to manufactured controversy. O’Keefe managed to goad several gullible employees into soliciting donations under the vague pretense that the money would help reduce the African-American population. O’Keefe did not uncover an organization that systematically funneled money toward genocidal ends; he managed to dupe several low-level, dimwitted staff members to say some stupid things. You know, I could probably make Glenn Beck say “underwear” by telling him to look under that thing over there.

Likewise with NPR, O’Keefe prodded Vivian Schiller to offer some unflattering commentary on the Tea Party. But did O’Keefe uncover a radical conspiracy to siphon federal funds toward an all-out assault on conservatives? Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t think Car Talk is a front for homicidal socialists bent on subverting the minds of mechanically-inclined Americans.

Sinclair went undercover to solve problems; O’Keefe goes undercover to create them.