Glenn Beck and ACORN

Yesterday on both the radio and TV shows, Glenn Beck played a tape of an interview at a Baltimore ACORN program that assists people applying for government subsidies for mortgages, helps with tax problems, and other assorted problems. A tour of the beautifully designed ACORN-ilk websites which lured unqualified people into sub-prime mortgages with government kick-back loans, to then running foreclosure workshops (all with government grants), or to borrowing government money to fix up the damaged home they helped them buy are disgusting. ACORN takes their cut at every level. Membership fees isn't how ACORN makes its money or pays its staff.

Yes, the Beck information was shocking, but not more important than the health care scam or cap and trade or automobile take over or the McCarthy-worthy interrogation that Barney Frank put on a few months ago.

Whether you love or hate ACORN, every smarmy act by the Baltimore ACORN staff could be explained.

For those who love ACORN, it could be (and the one you'll hear the most), 1) it's just one bad apple, these people do fine work; 2) it was all staged; 3) legally a prostitute only has to report the income, and all the ACORN tax advice was correct; 4) the ACORN workers were not being judgemental and that's the most important value in today's world (work in a phrase from the Bible here if possible); 5) and then ACORN apologists will segue to Christian, Jewish or other faith based organizations who have made similar "mistakes." They'll for sure bring up scandals they've read about priests. Maybe some witch burning in American history--that's always good. Or homosexual evangelical pastors visiting male prostitutes, etc. It's key to remember that for the left, hypocrisy (not sex slavery of children, not laundered money, not lying), is the most evil of all sin. And that part about the illegal, under-age prostitution ring the mortgage applicants were going to use the house for? Well, that's all open to interpretation, and Media watch dogs and fact checkers on the left will parse that tape to shreds, and close their eyes and ears.

And if you think ACORN is evil, the spawn of Satan, and this tape just proves it, you'd better look at the "laundered" government grant money your own organization gets, because the federal government has been taking more and more power from the local level through laws and regulations for decades, then to support those programs it taxes us, then it turns around and passes that money back to the local jurisdictions, states, non-profits, universities, think-tanks, foundations, churches, and political groups like ACORN, to do the "work of the people." (There's a sidewalk going in on our street and I'm betting it's your stimulus money.)

President Bush's administration was extremely careless with oversite of outsourced government programs, and fertilized the dirt in which the little acorn has grown to a huge tree with deep roots and wide branches. Remember, before Obama, no president had spent more on social engineering programs than Dubya, especially in education. Obama has left him in the dust with his trillions compared to Bush's billions.

The crime Beck exposed (although it wasn't his tape or his investigation) isn't the corruption, like he claimed. There were plenty of YouTube videos of ACORN stealing votes and bussing voters across Ohio's state lines during the 2008 campaign, and we just let that go. ACORN helped elect Obama, so nothing will come of this tape. It's the routine usurption of our rights and stealing our money that has been going on for decades through many administrations that is the big crime.

If conservatives try to make ACORN the whipping boy for problems that go back to Wilson and Roosevelt and probably before, this mess will never be cleaned up and we should never, never again go into a foreign war to aid a 2nd or 3rd world country in becoming a democracy, because we don't do so great at representative government ourselves.