Puffin’s Place

I wonder if in 2006 when Senator McCain gave the keynote speech at the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (the scandalous ACORN we have been hearing about) in Florida, he anticipated that a mere two years later, his party would characterize ACORN this way:

Sol Stern explains that Acorn is the key modern successor of the radical 1960’s “New Left,” with a “1960’s-bred agenda of anti-capitalism” to match. Acorn, says Stern, grew out of “one of the New Left’s silliest and most destructive groups, the National Welfare Rights Organization.” In the 1960’s, NWRO launched a campaign of sit-ins and disruptions at welfare offices. The goal was to remove eligibility restrictions, and thus effectively flood welfare rolls with so many clients that the system would burst. The theory, explains Stern, was that an impossibly overburdened welfare system would force “a radical reconstruction of America’s unjust capitalist economy.” Instead of a socialist utopia, however, we got the culture of dependency and family breakdown that ate away at America’s inner cities — until welfare reform began to turn the tide.

You noted the horrific shadow looming in this description> Anti-capitalism. Radical. New Left. Sit-ins. Socialist.

If you twist ACORN a bit to the right, you can see how the colors begin to fade and the shapes take on a predictable sameness. Check the organization on the GOP site, and you find that the organization, gasp, has stumbled the traditional liberal steps to hell: ”

“[A]CORN’s political action committee endorsed Barack Obama for President. … The endorsement reflects a belief that Obama – who worked as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago – understands that change must come from the ground-up, as part of a working coalition, rather than from position papers.” (Katrina Vanden Heuvel, Op-Ed, “ACORN: Obama Gets It,” The Nation, 2/23/08)” This same site highlights a variety of sins performed by Obama for ACORN and with ACORN. One wonders why McCain earlier keynoted such a group in its ceremony for ACORN’s immigration rally two years earlier.

Turn the glass a bit and some colors return as the Obama Fighting the Smears site offers the following glint of truth:

• Fact: Barack was never an ACORN community organizer.
• Fact: ACORN never hired Obama as a trainer, organizer, or any type of employee.
• Fact: ACORN was not part of Project Vote, the successful voter registration drive Barack ran in 1992.

In his capacity as an attorney, Barack represented ACORN in a successful lawsuit alongside the U.S. Department of Justice against the state of Illinois to force state compliance with a federal voting access law. For his work helping enforce the law, called “Motor Voter,” Barack received the IVI-IPO Legal Eagle Award in 1995. (For more about Barack’s career, check out our Obama bio.)

Now the Yahoos, who like to offer a “shout out” at third grade classes during VP debates, are taking the next predictable step: ACORN is deeply involved in voter fraud on behalf of Senator Obama.

Bogus “Voter Fraud Charges” Aim to Camouflage Voter Suppression
October 10, 2008

ACORN has just completed the largest, most successful nonpartisan voter registration drive in U.S. history. We helped 1.3 million low-income, minority and young voters across the country register to vote.

Unfortunately, just as in 2006, that success in bringing people into the democratic process, have been greeted with unfounded accusations to disparage our work and help maintain the status quo of an unbalanced electorate.

After a similar spate of charges against ACORN in 2006, we learned that then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales had fired Republican U.S. Attorneys because they refused to prosecute ACORN and other voter assistance groups on trumped up fraud charges. This was the heart of the U.S. Attorney-gate scandal that led Karl Rove, Gonzales and other top Department of Justice officials to resign. Because the press didn’t catch on until long after the election, it was part of a successful strategy to create an unfounded specter of voter fraud and to suppress voting.

Read the key facts behind the above charge at the ACORN website.

Oh, by the way, as your retirement funds collapse and more and more of us seek out Consumer Credit Counseling offices, try not to wonder why the country is asked to meditate on acorns rather than economics, health care, entitlement programs, and the inviolability of the Constitution. What there is left of it.