ACORN: Nuts Indeed -By The Reluctant Republican
Well folks, ACORN finally landed on the front page. Their Las Vegas office was just raided by Nevada State Police (full story here). Up until now, ACORN has managed to stay mostly buried in the news. That is, unless of course, you frequent “right wing” news sites. So what is ACORN exactly? It is the “Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now” which is largely backed by labor unions and other left leaning organizations (in addition to managing to draw in tens of millions of taxpayer dollars). Why is it in the news and why does it matter? Remember all of that talk about Obama being a “community organizer”? Well, some of his “community organizing” was done with and through ACORN (in addition to acting as the legal counsel for their Chicago branch for a period of time). As a matter of fact, he is largely credited with training ACORN’s Chicago branch while working there on effective “methods” of voter registration. The problem, however, is that ACORN has a long history of voter fraud. ACORN operatives have been convicted of voter fraud in Wisconsin, Colorado, and Washington with additional charges having been filed and pending in other states including Ohio, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, and now Nevada (see a full map of fraud charges here). ACORN operatives were recently convicted of submitting 1,794 fake voter registrations in Washington in 2006, and according to the Wall Street Journal (full story here):
In Ohio in 2004, a worker for one affiliate was given crack cocaine in exchange for fraudulent registrations that included underage voters, dead voters and pillars of the community named Mary Poppins, Dick Tracy and Jive Turkey. During a Congressional hearing in Ohio in the aftermath of the 2004 election, officials from several counties in the state explained Acorn’s practice of dumping thousands of registration forms in their lap on the submission deadline, even though the forms had been collected months earlier.
We’ve been round and round about whether or not it is legitimate to ascribe some sort of “guilt by association” to a candidate based on various individuals and organizations that hey come in contact with over the course of their career. And I certainly agree that as a politician one comes in contact with and even benefits from meeting with an enormous number of people and organizations; some of which would be antithetical to said politicians own beliefs or values. However, exactly how many of these “bad associations” do we need before it becomes a valid point to question a man’s judgement (and possibly even his intent, beliefs, and character)? In his extremely short political career, Barack Obama has managed get himself entangled with a radical left wing domestic terrorist as a fund raiser and career booster, a radical Reverend who claimed publicly that the U.S. government invented the AIDS virus as a means to control African Americans, hired a known Marxist as his official campaign blogger, and himself worked for probably the largest single organizer of voter fraud in the country. That is an unusual number of shady characters in the mix in a very short period of time, even for a politician. I don’t think its over the line or being in any way alarmist to ask questions about what appears to be a clear pattern in Senator Obama’s chosen associations over time and what that might say about him personally.
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The Reluctant Republican
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justinchina
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justinchina
Conservatism Lives!
