So the news has been all over the place today- ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) is being blamed by the wingnuts for "trying to steal the election".
I tried to get more background on ACORN, but their website is down. What I know is that ACORN is doing a lot of work this election season registering voters in low-income neighborhoods.
Frankly, I'm not interested in the details of GOP claims of "fraud", because they don't matter. The details have nothing to do with all the noise the wingers are making about this.
What ACORN did wrong in the eyes of the wingnuts, ultimately, was register poor and potentially homeless people to vote.
Before you read the rest of this diary, watch this video. The money quote is at the end.
"You also have people on the other political side [Democrats] who... like the situation just the way it is. Because what they [welfare recipients] do is produce voters for them [Democrats]."
The GOP knows that poor people will vote disproportionately for Democrats, because Democrats advocate policies that can help lift people out of poverty.
More people in the middle class means more people competing for a slice of the economic pie, and that's not the kind of America GOP campaign contributors want to have.
So instead of coming up with a workable Conservative approach to combating poverty, they've engaged in a generational effort to blame the poor and the Democrats for poverty, and suggest to their crazed, frothing, ignorant, hate-filled base that Democrats are keeping people poor on purpose to win votes.
When it's just a line used in a campaign, like Reagan blaming the country's problems on welfare queens just as he was tripling the deficit, it's one thing.
But when meatheads like LaBruzzo actually believe it, it becomes dangerous, and people start proposing sterilizing the poor.
LaBruzzo represents legions of brainwashed wingnuts who are convinced that poverty is a conspiracy hatched by the Democrats to win votes, and that means that any sustained effort to organize the poor is suspicious to these people.
It's the same reason why they attacked community organizers. It's the same reason these worthless shitheels are trying to blame the sub-prime mortgage crisis on "minorities".
It's the same reason that in every single goddamn election, the GOP targets poor and minority voters for removal from voter registration rolls.
So whether ACORN did anything wrong or not has nothing to do with the right's criticism of them, and eveything to do with the belief that the poor are a nuisance to be squashed. And if ACORN is trying to help the poor, they're seen as just part of the problem.
In other words, it's the ideology, stupid.