ACORN and government control

When I was in high school, we spent a great deal of time studying Tammany Hall, not just because the school wanted us to understand that government is inherently corrupt, but because of the charming George Washington Plunkitt and his wonderful autobiography, Plunkitt of Tammany Hall.  In it, with almost child-like innocence, he freely confesses to the most heinous kind of political corruption, always assuring his emanuensis (a newspaper reporter who lucked out with the interview) that he wasn’t really corrupt at all — he was just serving the people or taking intelligent advantage of available opportunities.

ACORN lacks that charm, but is in every way Tammany Hall’s equal.  Indeed, ACORN far surpasses Tammany Hall, in that it’s not just a single corrupt political entity, but is, instead, a far-reaching organization that touches every aspect of American political life, and always in the most criminal and corrupt ways.  If it were just a money skimming organization, this corruption might be disgusting, but tolerable.  What makes it so appalling, and so anti-Democratic, though, is that it’s fashioned itself into an arm of the Democratic party, and has used its illegal practices to affect the outcome of elections.  (I count myself amongst those who believe that Al Franken’s presence in the Senate comes about, not because he was elected by a majority of voters, but because ACORN controlled voting, and a partisan Democratic controlled the Secretary of State’s office.)

My screed here about ACORN doesn’t arise in a vacuum.  As Earl Aagaard reminded me, just last week, IBD wrote an editorial about the results of a congressional investigation into ACORN’s doings, and the facts are not pretty:

[The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s] more-than-80-page report charges that the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (Acorn) uses “a complex structure designed to conceal illegal activities” — 361 different entities in 120 cities, 43 states and the District of Columbia, amounting to a “shell game” that “diverts taxpayer and tax-exempt monies into partisan political activities.”

The group has over the last 15 years received in excess of $53 million in federal funds. Moreover, as the report warns, “under the Obama administration, Acorn stands to receive a whopping $8.5 billion in available stimulus funds.”

Acorn’s improprieties, of course, are not news. As Issa’s report notes, a third of the 1.3 million voter registration cards the organization solicited and presented in 2008 ended up being null and void; the group has been investigated for voter registration fraud in places such as Connecticut, Missouri, Nevada, North Carolina and Ohio.

You’d think that, with this level of corruption, someone — the media, politicians, etc., would be up in arms, but you’d be wrong.  They’d be up in arms if this was a money or sex corruption issue.  However, since it’s a corruption issue that strongly favors one political party over the other, and that party just happens to control the House, the Senate and the White House, the response is different:  as you see, Obama is funneling almost $9 billion dollars to his friends.

In addition, as you’ve read before, ACORN is going to control the upcoming census:

Yet this corrupt outfit has actually been signed up as a national partner with the U.S. Census Bureau to help recruit the nearly 1.5 million workers who will count and classify our 306 million population for 2010. It’s like getting a car thief to manage a parking garage.

You can imagine that the census numbers will permanently create vast Democratic voting districts, and identify funding needs that serve only Democratic products.  If this keeps going, by 2011, we’ll have lapsed permanently into a Banana Republic, headed by the chief banana himself, Barack Obama.

If you’re not worried, you should be.