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October 14, 2008

Making A Mountain Out Of An ACORN

It’s getting pathetic out there.

The #1, #2, and #3 issues for the right wing chatterers out there is ACORN, ACORN, and ACORN.

There’s not much else left in the tan, it seems, though listening to the righty shows, I am getting the hints of desperation and the next four years of “Obama and the left are out to destroy America” talk.

One conversation was about spreading a videotape of Jesse Jackson saying something bad about Israel to Jews in America… from a caller, encouraged by the host… because, you know, if one black guy said it…

One conversation was about John McCain taking control of the Reagan image of America as the greatest country ever conceived on earth, fighting for truth, justice and democracy across the globe. It’s a fascinating conceit. Of course, America is not really anxious to be listening to empty jargon right now… we’re anxious about our homes and our monthly nut.

But even more so, it is a real show of how out of touch a part of the right has become, still believing that our nation, now well into middle age (our last “youthful foray” into military force that was popular at home or abroad was WWII), is still the excited, highly-moral pup… in spite of all evidence to the contrary. Thing is, I love America and I defend it – often, to certain friends – as the best place for the individual to live and thrive. But I don’t buy into the lies blindly… and I honestly don’t think others who really spend time thinking about it do either… they just keep selling it because it is an opiate for the masses.

Again, this is why this election means so very much. Obama is flawed. He will make mistakes, some of experience, many of circumstance… as all presidents do. But he is fundamentally conscious of the real evolution of America’s place in the world. We are at a moment where a few other countries are gaining the power to make the world a multi-superpower game again. Do we want to be part of creating the next Cold War, as opposed to seeking peaceful solutions that allow us to live – as much as humanly possible – in a state of peace amongst the most powerful nations?

But I digress…

The most surprising thing about listening to an hour or two of talk radio while driving around and Fox News now is that McCain’s economic proposal, his big effort at a breakthrough, is not being discussed at all. The little talk about the economy I heard was anti-Obama, not pro-McCain.

Wait… Fox News is about to have walking punchline Douglas Holtz-Eakin on to talk about how this economic proposal is not like the others from McCain that were derided on both sides of the aisle before quietly disappearing from the stump speeches…

I’m not going to get into the details of McCain’s plan, but I will leave it to say that it is 100% aimed at the state of Florida, which is slipping away from his grasp. And even in that state, if the vast majority of people who will not be benefited by the variations of McCain’s offering from Obama’s really look at McCain’s plan, it will not work.

So we get back to scams, like the one currently on Fox News, that seizes of any phrase Obama breathes that they can spin into him being a socialist or a commie.

ACORN is the mother of all of these. You hear about it endlessly on the right wing stations. Obama, who worked on a case for ACORN as a lawyer more than a decade ago and whose campaign gave the group money for services early in this campaign, is trying to fix the election because there are so very stinky false registrations in a year where many millions of new, legitimate, registrations are being made… so many that many states are still catching up and are trying to figure out how to deal with expected enormous election day crowds.

Of course, you never hear about the “mistaken” voter purges that are taking place in bigger numbers, disenfranchising existing registered voters who are qualified to vote. In other words, ACORN, which hires people who are willing to work for very little money to register people, has put through a lot of bad voter registration forms. But someone would have to show up in an Ohio polling place with a driver’s license that actually confirmed that they were “Bugs Bunny” and not getting kicked out by the attendants in order for the “voter registration fraud” to become voting fraud. On the other hand, if you live in Ohio and the state somehow decided you were no longer a valid voter, didn’t inform you, and you didn’t check to make sure you were still registered, you show up on Nov 4 and you cannot place your vote.

ACORN is not a non-issue. Any organization that gets as deep as ACORN gets into the voting process should do a much better job of self-policing, especially if they hire some sketchy people who are willing to cheat in order to get paid. But the whole thing has become has been grossly overstated and then personalized to become an attack on Obama, whose relationship to all of this is marginal at worst. (The right never seems to bring up the Obama campaign’s actually in-house registration push. Hmmm…) It’s silly. It’s spin. And it’s desperate.

But they don’t have anything else, it seems.

Posted by dpoland at October 14, 2008 01:28 PM

Comments

Posted by: SJRubinstein at October 14, 2008 02:48 PM

Posted by: RP at October 14, 2008 07:41 PM

Posted by: RP at October 14, 2008 07:44 PM

Posted by: RP at October 14, 2008 07:58 PM

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