Making an Oak Tree out of an ACORN

Posted by admin on October 19, 2008 under Election 08, Politics | Comments are off for this article

John McCain, keynote speaker for ACORN, 2006

The McCain-Palin campaign has set about the task of making an Oak Tree out of an ACORN, if you’ll pardon my tortured metaphor. The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN for short, has been accused of perpetrating massive voter fraud by Senator McCain.

All hyperbole aside, what’s the charge against ACORN? Turning in voter registrations with fake names. Donald Duck, Minnie and Mickey Mouse, for example are registered to vote in multiple states. So what about that, sounds pretty serious, right?

“It is more likely that an individual will be struck by lightning than he will impersonate another voter at the polls.”

— Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU School of Law (Source)

To hear McCain and Palin tell it we’re in the midst of a massive lightning storm that’s striking people with such regularity that it is “destroying the fabric of democracy.”

But it’s even more of a cynical political move than it appears on the surface. Senator McCain has long been of a friend of ACORN, in fact he was a keynote speaker for the group in 2006. (Source) In fact the photo at the top of this article was taken at that event.

Finally let me just add that these “bogus” names are being reported, and culled, by none other than ACORN itself. Ask yourself why John McCain has a sudden new found hatred of ACORN? Could it be yet another piece in his “politics of distraction” campaign? Perhaps one designed to blunt cries of of “foul” over the Republicans massive voter suppression efforts, or the reports of electronic voting machines flipping votes already?