Today ACORN, Tomorrow Your World?

I’ve been watching the gleeful celebration of the death of ACORN around the PUMAsphere with sadness and dismay.  It’s not because I’m an ACORN advocate, far from it.  I actually know very little about the group, and, to be honest, most of what I’ve heard hasn’t been good.  It’s because I’ve realized that I’m a pretty liberal Democrat at heart, and a liberal institution is under vicious right wing attack, primarily for being a liberal institution:

Republicans have long seen the group — which offers housing and other services, including voter registration, to the poor — as a shady operation devoted to electing liberals and siphoning off taxpayer money.

[edit]

O’Keefe, however, said that he and Giles’ work was done independently and dismisses claims that the videos were paid for by conservative organizations. O’Keefe said he did receive advice from a conservative columnist.

After O’Keefe had filmed the first two videos — in Washington and Baltimore — a conservative friend urged him to share his project with Andrew Breitbart, a conservative Internet entrepreneur who had plans to launch an anti-liberal site called BigGovernment.com. Breitbart said he was skeptical after a June phone call with O’Keefe.

But when he saw the video in Los Angeles in July, Breitbart said, he gasped.

Breitbart, who had written a column for The Washington Times, advised O’Keefe to roll out the videos one by one, rather than at once.

“When I saw these videos, I couldn’t help thinking, this is the Abu Ghraib of the Great Society,” said Breitbart, who put the videos on BigGovernment.com. “Everybody that is a conservative news junkie thinks that ACORN is the most important institution for us to uncover to the American public.”

And, this is only the latest salvo in the ongoing left/right ideological war; anyone who doesn’t see that other liberal icons, including those that support women’s reproductive rights,  represent successive upcoming battlegrounds in this concerted conservative campaign, has their their own eyes deliberately shut and their fingers in their ears, shouting “la-la-la-la-la” on purpose to drown out the obvious truth.  Though I did change my voting status to Independent in protest of the actions of the Democrats on Obama’s behalf, it’s not because I have anything against electing a black man to lead the country, or because I want the party destroyed.  On the contrary, I want the party reformed, and would welcome the opportunity to vote for any of its candidates willing to work to advance its stated principles, especially a person of color, to be quite honest.  I certainly never entertained the notion of becoming a Republican, or of joining hands with them to advance their principles and help them achieve their goals.  My considerations were certainly never about voting for a woman over a man, black or white, but about not letting such issues stand in the way of electing the best candidate.  Period.

It would be extremely naive to think that everyone in America celebrated the day the country “turned a corner,” racially, so to speak, and elected a non-threatening (to them) black president.  It’s hard not to see alarmingly ratcheted up racism everywhere in the wake of that event, no matter how hard he, and everybody else, tries to pretend otherwise.  It’s hard not to see the virulent racism on display in the misappropriation of the charge, as well as in equally offensive denials in the face of blatant examples of it, akin to “I’m (they’re) not racist, I (they) just hate jigaboos,” or, more often, “that particular jigaboo.”   “He started it,” is not a good excuse, even if you could lay blame for all of America’s racial turbulence at Obama’s feet with a straight face.

I didn’t like it at all when Obama adopted right wing “personal responsibility” memes and basically campaigned by telling African Americans to stop acting like “n*ggers.”  I saw the danger in his playing with the “scary black men who look like me” crap and knew it would come back to bite us all in the ass, just like it is now.  I was alarmed and afraid when he, simply to gain enough advantage to do the same things himself once in office, turned the primaries into a black/white finger-pointing exercise to wrest support away from Clinton, not for the opportunity to champion the cause of a disenfranchised group the Bush administration turned it’s back on and let suffer, most notably in the hurricane Katrina incident, simply to prove to America with documented televised proof, that desperate people, weary of sitting starving in their own filth among their dead and dying, will lash out against those they feel bear responsibility, and anyone else unfortunate enough to be nearby; but to stifle it.

Yes, Obama bears responsibility for inciting a lot of the racism currently on display, but that doesn’t excuse, or diminish, the severity of the real, and/or potential resurgence-as-backlash we’re now seeing everywhere.  Just as many people love him just because he’s black as hate him for the same reason.  Both camps are racist, they do not cancel each other out.

ACORN was born in Arkansas, also adoptive home of the one survivor of last year’s primaries who’s managed to remain unsullied and stay above the fray.  That right wingers have long attempted to plumb the depths of all of ACORN’s Democratic relationships, should come as a surprise to no one.  And, there couldn’t be a racial element to any of that, could there?  Nobody PUMAs care about is likely to be tarnished by blowback from assaults against the organization, right?

ACORN supported and lobbied for the “Motor Voter” Act. After its passage, ACORN members attended President Clinton’s signing ceremony. ACORN then pursued new registration laws in Arkansas and Massachusetts and filed suit in Illinois, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, New Jersey and Pennsylvania as a result of the act.

According to Andrew Brietbart, who we must remember is a very extreme right wing anti-Democrat, the next victim of his wrath is the National Endowment of the Arts.  I have no idea exactly how he plans to go about it, however, I’m convinced it now has his bullseye on its back.  I also have no proof that he is working in concert with the other right wing TEA Party/Townhall/Recess Rally factions who count on having their agenda pushed via Fox News and its “darling of the moment,” be it Bleck, Hannity, O’Reilly, whoever, it really doesn’t matter, but, let’s just say I’d be shocked and amazed if he wasn’t.

Once their Van Jones/ACORN/NEA mission is accomplished, could Breitbart/Backmann/Palin “save the unborn” campaigns be far behind?  Will PUMAs support that, too?  Before anyone dismisses my comments out of hand, consider this.  At what turned into a “we’re not racists, we just hate liberals” Republican rally, the LA Times reported this quote:

“It’s important that we robustly reject any charges that we’re racist,” said Gary Bauer, president of the social conservative group American Values, who brought activists to their feet Friday with a pugnacious speech arguing that conservatives would gladly support any minority candidate for president who embraced their “pro-family, pro-life” values.  (my bold)

Are there really many PUMAs willing to proclaim that Obama hasn’t?

What does that leave you with?

The truth?

To be sure, tangled political webs exist.  But, it seems to me, jumping aboard pretty bandwagons could lead you right smack into the midst of one you’d probably rather avoid if you knew in advance where you’d end up.  Maybe it would be best to leave the reformation of the Democratic party to the Democrats, and let the Republicans turn their efforts into getting their own house in order.