ACORN vindicated

by: WillyK

Tue Mar 02, 2010 at 16:46:10 PM CST

Brooklyn district attorney announced the local ACORN office there hadn't engaged in any criminal conduct -- despite the hyperventilating by Breitbart and on Fox News. And in fact, a law enforcement source told the New York Daily News, the hidden-camera tapes James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles made of themselves posing as a prostitute and her boyfriend were "edited to meet their agenda."

Get that - the videos were "edited to meet their agenda." In other words, these full-of-themselves rightwing echo chamber trainees, O'Keefe and  Giles, were running a scam.

The Brooklyn investigation is the third such to cast doubt on O'Keefe's and Giles' veracity. Investigations by the former Massachusetts Attorney, Scott Harshbarger, and the Congressional Research Service have found ACORN innocent of wrong doing. These investigations also found:

...that O'Keefe likely the broke the law in at least two states by secretly recording the videos which had voice-overs deceptively edited into them later, "in some cases substantially," according to Harshbarger's report, so that it was "difficult to determine the questions to which ACORN employees are responding.

What I want to know is when will Blaine Luetkemeyer and Todd Akin take formal steps to disavow the resolution they sponsored to honor "the fact-finding reporting done by Hannah Giles and James O'Keefe III in their investigation in the fraudulent and illegal practices and misuse of taxpayer dollars by the Association of Community Organization for Reform Now (ACORN)."

And, because I am an equal opportunity scold, I also want to know when Claire McCaskill will apologize for unhesitatingly taking the unverified exposé at face value in her hurry to cover her backside, declaring:

It'll have to make your blood boil to watch those tapes and realize that people are actually thinking of helping people by giving them advice on how to evade the law. I think you'll see this organization continue to be marginalized.

Of course, I  really can't wait until all the newspaper and TV reporters who gleefully delivered the ugly details of O'Keefe's and Giles smear run the story about their "editing" practices just as prominently - it'll happen any day now, don't ya think?