Glenn Beck
In April 2006, with the approval ratings of President George W. Bush plummeting, his senior political advisor, Karl Rove, began discussing a plan to turn things around.
His strategy: attack progressive organizations that were registering low-income people to vote and helping them fight corporate power — and claim it was about voter fraud.
The main White House target, newly released records show, was the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). By the end of 2006, Rove would oversee the removal of eight U.S. attorneys, including two who refused to press bogus charges against ACORN in New Mexico and Missouri, and a third under similar suspicions in Washington state.
ACORN made a convenient target for Rove and his gang — and the well-orchestrated attacks on that group, which have exploded into the headlines this year, provide a compelling case study in how the right wing operates in this country.
Although it was the GOP that removed tens of thousands of likely Democratic voters from the rolls in the 2000 and 2004, the Republicans and their allies were able to make the issue of voter fraud all about ACORN, using a handful of isolated problems to undercut an organization focused on giving a voice to poor people.
Founded in Little Rock, Ark. at the end of the 1960s, ACORN has grown into the nation's top community-organizer group, thanks to success in improving poor people's housing, wages, and educational access. By the eve of the 2008 presidential election, ACORN had helped register more than 1.3 million voters — mostly young, low-income minorities — in 21 states, including the battleground states of Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Ohio.
As The Nation put it, these successes made ACORN "something of a right-wing bogeyman."
And while the recent furor over a conservative videographer secretly taping ACORN employees saying dumb things has somehow become one of the big political stories of the year, the major media have mostly ignored how this attack is part of a larger conservative strategy.
In August, hundreds of pages of e-mails and transcripts related to the 2006 U.S. attorney-firing scandal were released to the press and public — but few news outlets mentioned that Rove was focused on attacking ACORN's voter registration efforts, even though ACORN and voter fraud are repeatedly mentioned in these documents.
"This is about a campaign that goes back a decade to big business and that people who don't like what ACORN does and is effective at — namely, helping groups to organize and put pressure on banks around sub[prime] mortgage loans to stop racial discrimination," Peter Dreier, a professor of politics at Occidental College, told us.
It wasn't really about voter fraud. As former U.S. Attorney David Iglesias, a Republican from New Mexico, recently stated on The Rachel Maddow Show: "They were looking at numbers [and] didn't like the demographic tidal wave that was coming their way so they wanted to engage the machinery of the Justice Department to stop that wave."
After two years of investigating ACORN and other ...
DUH!
I mean, if FOX was able to mobilize people to win elections, then they would be worth paying attention to. But their tactic is to spray a shotgun blast at their audience, hoping that any given single pellet on any given single issue lodges in everyone's craw, death panels, killing the disabled, defunding medicare and not insuring Republicans are examples in the health care debate. To contest that means to be drawn by your opponent to covering your entire court, which places you at the disadvantage.
But FOX News is mobilizing fewer and fewer people, it is further marginalizing the right wing and doing its best to divide the Republican Party into its constituent parts, to dismantle the coalition that Reagan built! Unlike 1980, when the Democrats were descendant and the Republicans on the rise and the nascent right wing dogma seemed too looney to be taken seriously (I was young, but Reagan was resoundingly laughed at during his 1976 go for the GOP nomination) the opposite is now true. Progressives should be celebrating and encouraging this.
The GOP has enacted its economic sharia into law, and by successfully pursuing that has demolished the US empire militarily, politically and economically and diminished its political strength domestically so that they are but a side show in Congress. The side show is bolstered by the side show media like FOX and WorldNetDaily, but only bolstered because the political presence is so anemic.
It is wonderful that progressives have a nightly media lineup to call our own, to represent our positions to the nation. However, the moment you allow your opponent to successfully frame the debate and contest them on their terms, you cede position, power and authority and are at an inherent disadvantage, a position which can compromise even the largest congressional majorities.
-marc
But the point everyone misses is you need the crazies on the left and the nuts on the right as a check and balance in order to find the middle.
And to say that Fox news on a whole is not a news organization is also absurd. They meet every definition of news as do other news organizations.
Speaking of ACORN, the sting team went to 4 ACORN offices, and videotaped live examples of how corrupt ACORN is. ACORN was willing to cheat the IRS on taxes. ACORN was willing to help get 13 year old girls into the U.S. to be used as prostitutes!! ACORN was telling the sting team how not to get caught by ICE, the police, and the IRS! Look for yourself! First ACORN denied everything, then, when caught in the open, sued the sting team! Deny everything, attack the messenger.
"The IRS was the latest agency to distance itself from ACORN. The IRS said it would eject ACORN from the agency's volunteer tax assistance program, which provides tax-preparation help to about 3 million low-income workers. The Obama administration also canceled plans for the group to help with the 2010 census two weeks ago when the videos surfaced."
"ACORN has scrambled to regain Democratic support after the Senate and House last week voted overwhelmingly to block federal funding of the organization. In the past, Democrats steadfastly defended the group against conservative charges it skirts tax laws, violates election rules and commits other crimes while heavily supporting Democratic candidates and liberal causes."
Even the White House and Congress, both ruled by the 'left-wing', are embarrassed by ACORN.
"ACORN's "shock troops" have been linked to or convicted of perjury, forgery, identity theft and election fraud in recent years and now are facing investigation for alleged violations of federal election law in 12 states, according to a new report from Matthew Vadum, a senior editor for the Capital Research Center."
""In 1995, ACORN sued the state of California seeking an exemption from the law that requires that it pay its own employees a minimum wage. ACORN, which argued that keeping its employees in poverty helps to boost their zeal to help the poor, lost," according to the report."
Wow. ACORN refused to pay minimum wage to its own employees.
""Ironically, ACORN and its affiliates, all reliable cheerleaders for higher taxes, are longtime tax deadbeats. A search of public records found more than 200 federal, state, and local tax liens adding up to more than $3.7 million that are associated with groups that share ACORN's address on Elysian Fields Avenue in New Orleans," the report continued.
According to the report, the Wall Street Journal's John Fund, a vote fraud expert, attributes ACORN's rising level of aggressiveness to its "desperation."
"He argues that ACORN had to join with unions and other left-wing groups in an all-out push for an Obama victory in the hope that the scandals would all get swept under the rug," the report said."
"ACORN has become an issue in the 2008 presidential race because of Obama's ties to the group as well as its own admission that more than 400,000 of the 1.3 million voter registrations it claims to have collected were not valid."
The two writers of this political hit piece refused to be honest about ACORN, and it is obvious they refused to be honest about anything else. 'Progressives' just get progressively dumber.
This article really smells of AOCRN's BS. And look who is authors.
They are spreading ACORN socialist agenda thru every sentence and not just in here.
I don't believe thats possible.
I've watched the liberal left repeatedly bash President George Bush in every way imaginable, portraying him as less than human, for a period of eight years....And they have yet to convince me, that he is anything less than a decent man with a true concern for the well being of this country.
Here is a well written article WORTH reading...
[link]
The main reason I voted for Obama in 2008 was one part white guilt, and one part the desire to know that in Texas, every night, so many paranoid white people go to bed crying knowing that there is a black family living in the White House.
How can you defend ACORN, an organization that has been proven over and over again to be corrupt, and then attack Fox News, a news organization that wants nothing more than for this country to get back on the right path (the one our forefathers paved for us).
I’d like to touch base with you two journalists in a few years and see if you still feel the same way at the end of Obama’s term when several of your rights, including your freedom of speech and freedom of the press, have been taken away from you. Then we’ll see how crazy the right wing “nuts” are.
That's just funny in light of what we now all know about ACORN.
Sadly, a 23 year old posing as a prostitute knows a lot more about journalism than the author of this Acorn apologist piece.
Comment on: Attack of the right-wing nuts
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