Imagine with me that you\u2019ve offered to help a teen-age relative prepare a school report on American politics of the early 1970s.<\/p>\n
Using the Internet or hieing yourselves down to the local university library, you start reading the 36-year-old reports of the developing scandal that began when some very unusual burglars were apprehended attempting to break into the Democratic national campaign headquarters at Washington\u2019s Watergate Hotel.<\/p>\n
But something strikes you odd. In all the discussions of who financed these undercover operations, who ordered them, who stood to profit by them, one name is curiously missing. In none of the stories can you find any mention of the name \u201cRichard Nixon.\u201d<\/p>\n
Wow! What kind of a time warp have you entered? Has someone been going back and rewriting history? Anyone who lived through those times knows that the recurring question, repeated by rote in virtually every \u201cMainstream Media\u201d report and then picked up as a virtual mantra by congressional investigators, was \u201cWhat did the president know, and when did he know it?\u201d<\/p>\n
It was the question of what role President Nixon played in the operations and their subsequent cover-up — along with how these developing revelations might impact his ability to retain the presidency — that MADE \u201cWatergate\u201d a national story.<\/p>\n
Pinching yourself to make sure you\u2019re not dreaming, you decide to move a dozen years forward in your inquiries, checking the late 1986 news stories about the scandal that became known as the \u201cIran-Contra affair,\u201d in which Oliver North, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, and others were charged with breaking the law when they sold arms to Iran in hopes both of winning release of six U.S. hostages, and also to generate funds to support anti-communist guerrillas in Nicaragua.<\/p>\n
And guess what name you find missing? Nowhere in any of the news accounts do you find any mention of the name \u201cRonald Reagan” — what the president knew, how the scandal might affect his future and that of his party.<\/p>\n
That would be just WEIRD, wouldn\u2019t it? Kind of like something out of the old \u201cTwilight Zone\u201d TV show.<\/p>\n
Well, friends, welcome to the twilight zone, 2009.<\/p>\n
The Internal Revenue Service said last Wednesday it\u2019s severing ties with ACORN, the group of radical inner-city \u201ccommunity organizers\u201d involved in yet another scandal after employees at different ACORN offices in different cities were caught on undercover videotape giving advice to a couple posing as a prostitute and pimp — advice on how to evade income taxes, \u201cqualify\u201d for a tax-subsidized mortgage for their planned house of ill repute, claim underage illegal-alien prostitutes as \u201cdependants,\u201d etc.<\/p>\n
In response, the House and Senate voted two weeks back to sever federal funding to ACORN. Last week, the Census Bureau severed its ties with the group for the 2010 national head-count.<\/p>\n
ACORN scandal stories — finally — have been all over the news. But whose name has been missing from those stories? You will search high and low in today\u2019s stories for the question, \u201cWhat will be the political impact of these revelations on … Barack Obama? What did he know and when did hew know it?\u201d<\/p>\n
The officials White House position is that Barack Obama barely knows the ACORN crowd.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe only involvement I\u2019ve had with ACORN was I represented them alongside the U.S. Justice Department in making Illinois implement a motor-voter law that helped people get registered at DMVs,\u201d Barack Obama said during last October\u2019s debate against John McCain.<\/p>\n
But that \u201cwas a total lie,\u201d reported Deroy Murdock on the National Review Online the next day, Oct. 16, 2008.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhile Obama and remorseless Weather Underground co-founder William Ayers both served on the board of directors of Chicago\u2019s Woods Fund, Chicago ACORN received $190,000 in Woods money,\u201d Murdock reported.<\/p>\n
\u201cObama\u2019s campaign paid $832,598 last February to Citizens Services, Inc., an ACORN affiliate,\u201d Mr. Murdock reported. \u201cThe campaign originally described this to the Federal Election Commission as \u2018staging, sound, lighting.\u2019 Last August, this filing was amended to show this money purchased get-out-the-vote services. ACORN spokesmen have admitted that roughly $80,000 of Obama\u2019s payment to CSI flowed into ACORN\u2019s coffers.\u201d<\/p>\n
But maybe Mr. Murdock just has it in for Mr. Obama because he\u2019s a \u201cracist,\u201d eh?<\/p>\n
Oh, wait … Deroy Murdock is black.<\/p>\n
(\u201cNo, Deroy\u2019s not a racist, he\u2019s an Uncle Tom,\u201d replies one of my Review-Journal Online readers, under a predictable cloak of anonymity. Don\u2019t you just love our modern radical leftists — a hateful racist epithet ready for every eventuality!)<\/p>\n
The kind of \u201ccommunity organizing\u201d taught by Saul \u201cThe Red\u201d Alinsky and then picked up and taught by Mr. Obama to his pals at ACORN isn\u2019t about organizing sock hops or basketball teams. ACORN community organizers don\u2019t come back to the office bragging about how they\u2019ve set up Young Republican clubs and Ayn Rand reading groups. Check out Sol Stern\u2019s 2003 City Journal article, \u201cACORN\u2019s Nutty Regime for Cities.\u201d Acorn\u2019s goals are municipal \u201cliving wage\u201d laws targeting \u201cbig-box\u201d stores like Wal-Mart, rolling back welfare reform, and regulating banks, supposedly to combat \u201cpredatory lending.\u201d<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, instead of helping workers, Acorn\u2019s living-wage campaigns drive businesses out of the very neighborhoods where jobs are needed. And Acorn uses banking regulations to pressure financial institutions into massive \u201cdonations\u201d that it uses to finance supposedly non-partisan voter turn-out drives, Mr. Stern reports.<\/p>\n
At the National Review Online, Stanley Kurtz reports on a friendly feature about Mr. Obama in the Los Angeles Times, which reported Madeleine Talbot, then the leader of Chicago ACORN, was so impressed by Obama\u2019s organizing skills in an asbestos cleanup at a low-income housing project that she invited him to help train her own staff.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe extent of Obama\u2019s ties to Acorn has not been recognized,\u201d Mr. Kurtz reports. \u201cWe find some important details in an article in the journal Social Policy entitled, \u2018Case Study: Chicago — The Barack Obama Campaign,\u2019 by Toni Foulkes, a Chicago Acorn leader and a member of Acorn\u2019s National Association Board. …<\/p>\n
\u201cWhile most press accounts imply that Obama just happened to be at the sort of public-interest law firm that would take Acorn\u2019s \u2018motor voter\u2019 case, Foulkes claims that Acorn specifically sought out Obama\u2019s representation in the motor voter case, remembering Obama from the days when he worked with Talbot. …<\/p>\n
\u201cAt least a few news reports have briefly mentioned Obama\u2019s role in training Acorn\u2019s leaders, but none that I know of have said what Foulkes reports next: that Obama\u2019s long service with Acorn led many members to serve as the volunteer shock troops of Obama\u2019s early political campaigns — his initial 1996 State Senate campaign, and his failed bid for Congress in 2000 (Foulkes confuses the dates of these two campaigns.) With Obama having personally helped train a new cadre of Chicago Acorn leaders, by the time of Obama\u2019s 2004 U.S. Senate campaign, Obama and Acorn were \u2018old friends,\u2019 says Foulkes.\u201d<\/p>\n
By the time Obama sought the \u201cnon-partisan\u201d ACORN\u2019s 2008 endorsement for the presidency, he reminded Acorn officials: \u201cI\u2019ve been fighting alongside ACORN on issues you care about my entire career. Even before I was an elected official, when I ran Project Vote voter registration drive in Illinois, ACORN was smack dab in the middle of it, and we appreciate your work.\u201d<\/p>\n
Why, I wonder, does the Cleveland Leader report the journal Social Policy recently pulled this particular article from their web site? Is there a campaign afoot by Obama\u2019s allies to bury the president\u2019s many substantial links to ACORN? This is hardly a matter of one or two ACORN employees going astray, after all. Multiple ACORN employees and their managers and supervisors have drawn official probes for voter registration fraud in each of 11 states — some have already been prosecuted, pleaded guilty, and turned state\u2019s evidence. Nor is this mere \u201cguilt by association,\u201d since Obama fully embraces ACORN\u2019s goals and radical confrontational tactics — heck, he\u2019s even TAUGHT them.<\/p>\n
\u201cObama took the case, known as ACORN vs. Edgar (the name of the Republican governor at the time) and we won,\u201d Foulkes wrote in the \u201cSocial Policy\u201d piece. \u201cObama then went on to run a voter registration project with Project VOTE in 1992 that made it possible for Carol Moseley Braun to win the Senate that year. Project VOTE delivered 50,000 newly registered voters in that campaign (ACORN delivered about 5,000 of them).\u201d<\/p>\n
Non-partisan? (And speaking of racism, wasn\u2019t it the financially creative Ms. Moseley Braun who once compared columnist George Will to a Klansman?)<\/p>\n
\u201cSince then, we have invited Obama to our leadership training sessions to run the session on power every year, and, as a result, many of our newly developing leaders got to know him before he ever ran for office,\u201d Mr. Foulkes wrote. \u201cThus it was natural for many of us to be active volunteers in his first campaign for State Senate and then his failed bid for U.S. Congress in 1996. By the time he ran for U.S. Senate, we were old friends.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cObama\u2019s ties to Acorn — arguably the most politically radical large-scale activist group in the country — are wide, deep, and longstanding,\u201d Mr. Kurtz reports in his National Review essay, suggesting Mr. Obama did so much to channel state funds to ACORN while an Illinois lawmaker that he should have been dubbed \u201cthe senator from ACORN.\u201d<\/p>\n
And that was before Mr. Obama got control of the FEDERAL funding hose.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf Acorn is adept at creating a non-partisan, inside-game veneer for what is in fact an intensely radical, leftist, and politically partisan reality, so is Obama himself,\u201d Mr. Kurtz concludes. \u201cThis is hardly a coincidence: Obama helped train Acorn\u2019s leaders in how to play this game.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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