Ed Kilgore on ACORN mania among conservatives:
Regular readers of this site know the narrative by now: engorged with federal grants, ACORN engineered the housing and financial crises by intimidating lenders into offering mortgages to poor and minority families with no means or intentions of making their payments, and then when the chickens came home to roost, gambled everything on an illegal effort to secure bailouts and a general “socialist” takeover of the country by stealing the White House for its long-time associate and radical community organizer, Barack Obama.
….Any narrative this powerful has to be fed continuously, which is why the recent congressional vote stripping ACORN of nearly all access to federal grants was a pyrrhic victory for conservatives. How could they keep fear of ACORN alive?
That necessity led to yesterday’s strange event in the U.S. House, a partisan “forum” on ACORN that was sort of a parody of a congressional hearing, based on the circular reasoning that the refusal of the House itself to launch an wide-ranging investigation of ACORN was proof of the conspiracy’s power.
You can read Dave Weigel’s detailed account of the “forum” by following the link above, but the main claim yesterday (specifically by Rep. Darrell Issa of CA) was that the White House serves as a “war room” for ACORN, as “proved” by Obama’s tangential relationship with ACORN years ago in Chicago, and more recently, by the hiring of Democratic election law wizard Bob Bauer as White House Counsel. Bauer’s smoking gun, it seems, is that he once wrote a memo dismissing broad-based GOP election fraud claims, and warning (accurately) that they would be retailed by the McCain-Palin campaign. Anyone denying the conspiracy, you see, is obviously a party to it.
In the same way that ClimateGate, though relatively trivial from the standpoint of science, is helping keep the faith among climate deniers, the ACORN videotapes, which have nothing to do with voter registration, are keeping the faith among the election fraud conspiracy theorists. It would be loads of fun to watch if only it were happening in someone else’s country.
