Lying To Make Friends

Over the past year, ACORN has taken on nearly mythical status in the deranged minds of the Tea Party crowd.   ACORN has been imbued with the power to steal elections (even elections in which the organization has no involvment) and figures prominently in Glenn Beck’s chalkboard exposes of the vast left-wing conspiracy.  Far from being just a sideshow in the conservative media, anti-ACORN hysteria has reached the halls of Congress and had a significant effect on the governing of our nation.  A bill to extend unemployment insurance, which is kind of a big deal right now, was held up for weeks in the Senate  in part because Republicans were demanding a vote on an anti-ACORN amendment.  The bill eventually passed 98-0.

But last week was a good week for ACORN.  First, the results of an independent investigation, commissioned by ACORN and conducted by a former Attorney General of Massachusetts and the esteemed law firm Proskauer Rose, revealed no pattern of illegal activity by ACORN and cast doubt on the most damning piece of evidence touted by the Right.  Then, on Thursday, a federal judge ruled that the bill passed by Congress to strip ACORN of any federal funding it receives is unconstitutional.

What the investigation revealed is what anyone who has actually dealt ACORN already knew:  that the problem with the organization isn’t corruption but rather disorganization and lack of oversight.  And rather than serving some great liberal conspiracy to steal elections and install communist dictators, ACORN’s flaws undermine, rather than further, its true and noble mission of organizing low-income people, providing them services and getting them to be more active in their communities.

With the prostitution video discredited, the only evidence ACORN’s critics really have is stories of organizers turning in fraudulent voter registration cards.  But like ACORN’s disorganization more generally, this specific charge doesn’t indicate some great conspiracy to steal elections, but rather reveals a waste of resources that undermines ACORN’s true mission of empowering low-income communities.  It doesn’t help low-income communities or ACORN-backed candidates if some unscrupulous canvasser registers Mickey Mouse to vote; he ain’t showing up on Election Day.  As someone who has worked in community organizing, I can say from experience that there’s nothing more frustrating than realizing that you’ve wasted your organization’s resources to pay someone to go sit in a park and write made-up names on a piece of paper.

The best news for ACORN is that neither the Right’s crackerjack gumshoes nor their own investigators have yet uncovered ACORN’s true scheme:  to buy up cheap property in the California desert, then have their crony Barack Obama detonate a nuclear weapon in the San Andreas fault so that Southern California crumbles into the ocean and ACORNburg becomes expensive beachfront property.

-AR