The New York Times Weekend Opinionater today reviews the ACORN scandal and the resulting blog commentary. More after the jump.
The New York Times Weekend Opinionater today reviews the ACORN scandal and here are my comments:
This article should be entitled "How the Right Took Down ACORN and How the Left Let Them". I'm watching this video now for the third or fourth time and still have not actually seen the person asking the questions actually ask them. The assumption is that the ACORN workers are giving answers to the "questions" being asked by the disembodied voice.
Instead of questioning the veracity of these videos, the Left, along with Congress, has bent over backwards agreeing with what is "presented". Are we really such defeatists that we allow scam artists to destroy an organization whose goals according to O'Keefe's voiceover "advocate the registration of new voters and affordable housing especially in the innercity" (as if this were a bad thing).
The "thorough background piece" from the Washington Post barely scratches the surface of who these two grifters are. Where is the expose' piece on who James O'Keefe is (so far not one article has even mentioned where he lives or what he actually does for a living) or anything other than mere mention of the extreme conservative viewpoint of Hannah Giles' father and his "church"? A church that "meets" in a hotel ballroom. If nothing else, this article proves that perhaps investigative reporting by real newspapers is in fact dead and that herd mentality is alive and well not just at the NY Times, and on the blogosphere, including the Daily Kos (where I have seen way too many Kosians willing to take the videos at face value) but also in Washington.
This entire ACORN episode will no doubt go down in history as the biggest con job perpetrated by the Right since the lead up to the Iraq war.