It's time to get real about the Republican distraction de jour - the great ACORN controversy.
The bottom line is this: if the same standard used to prevent ACORN from receiving federal contracts were applied to many large corporations -- Boeing, financial institutions like AIG and CitiCorp, not to speak of private military contractors like Blackwater -- they would all have been barred as federal contractors long ago. But instead of being blacklisted, many of them actually received billions of taxpayer dollars to bail them out.
ACORN has worked for decades to organize a nationwide grass roots community organization with a mission of empowering poor and moderate income people. ACORN has never been one of those outfits that seeks just to "represent" the interests of the poor. Since its inception it has been made up of poor and moderate income people themselves. Its members pay dues, elect their leadership and choose the battles that they fight. Its executives don't make huge salaries and - in my experience - most of its organizers and staff are true believers who really care about the battle for social justice.
The Right wing has always hated ACORN. Partially that's because the organization has been effective - especially when it comes to its battles for better housing and its campaigns to empower the poor the way we should do it in a democracy - registering people to vote. The Right wing hates it when poor people vote.
During last year's election campaign the Republicans did everything they could to discredit ACORN by exposing "irregularities" in some of its voter registration programs. They pointed to a number of instances when ACORN canvassers - who were being paid to register people to vote - registered non-existent voters like "Mickey Mouse".
It was absolutely wrong for some ACORN employees to fake registrations to meet their quotas and keep their jobs. And ACORN's voter registration operation should have caught these fake registrations with better quality control. But there was never any danger that there would be a parade of cartoon characters out of Disney World and "Mickey Mouse" or "Donald Duck" were going to show up at a polling place and cast a ballot. To hear the right wing media tell it, ACORN was engaged in a great voter fraud scheme. In reality, a handfull of its canvassers were defrauding the organization itself - and also creating a public relations nightmare.
The Republicans knew full well that there was no danger of "Mickey Mouse" voting. But they milked the "controversy" for every ounce of bad publicity they could deliver - and did their best to paint the former community organizer Barack Obama with the same brush.
Backed Into A Corner, Boehner Admits That Obama Is Not A Socialist
Today on CNN’s State of the Union, Obama responded to these charges from conservative leaders, stating, “You know, I’m amused. I can’t tell you how many foreign leaders who are heads of center-right governments say to me, I don’t understand why people would call you socialist, in my country, you’d be considered a conservative.”
