Stabbing yourself in the back
by digby
For some unknown reason I’ve been thinking about this all day today:
The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) was a collection of community-based organizations in the United States and internationally that advocated for low- and moderate-income families by working on neighborhood safety, voter registration, health care, affordable housing, and other social issues…
ACORN conducted voter registration drives, as well as working to remove systemic barriers to registration of low and working-class voters. The Republican Party regularly alleged that it committed voter fraud, but few cases have been found or prosecuted. The organization conducted its own audits and cooperated with investigations of employees, referring some cases to law enforcement.
ACORN suffered an extremely damaging nationwide controversy beginning in the fall of 2009 after two conservative activists secretly made and released videos of staged interactions with low-level ACORN personnel in several offices, portraying them as encouraging criminal behavior. Some media publicized the videos without investigation. These videos were later found in several independent law enforcement investigations to have been partially falsified and selectively edited by the activists, James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles.
The organization suffered an immediate loss of funding from government agencies with which it had contracts, and from private donors prior to the results of any investigations. Legislative amendments to spending bills in the United States House and Senate prohibited government funding of the group.
Four different independent investigations by various state and city Attorneys General and the GAO released in 2009 and 2010 cleared ACORN, finding its employees had not engaged in the alleged criminal activities and that the organization had appropriately managed its federal funding. Their reports described the videos as deceptively edited to present the workers in the worst possible light. The loss of funds had been too damaging and by March 2010, 15 of ACORN’s 30 state chapters had already closed. ACORN announced it was closing its remaining state chapters and disbanding.
Yeah, I guess the reason I’ve been thinking about this all day — and Shirley Sherrod and “General Betrayus” too — is because I’m seeing a bunch of embarrassing, timorous Democrats talking about Planned Parenthood and Clinton’s ridiculous email controversy and this story is a perfect example of how often they are easily frightened once the Villagers determine that something’s ripe for one of their feeding frenzies. Planned Parenthood will likely survive the assault but will be seriously weakened. That’s a scalp the Democrats know would be suicidal to give up entirely, no matter how much they would like to do it. It remains to be seen if they will adequately defend Clinton from this inane email nonsense.
I can’t think of such examples on the right. But then they don’t loathe themselves the way Democrats do.
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