In the wake of film-makers James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles' video of ACORN members from different offices supposedly advising them, dressed/posing as a "couple", (O'Keefe dressed as a pimp and Giles as his prostitute looking to learn how to conceal cash earnings and hide underage sex slaves from foreign countries) has become the latest symbol of government waste and fraud on Capitol Hill.
But is it? Reality check.
O'Keefe and Giles will never be confused with Woodward & Bernstein and "the couple" were actually sent in to "set traps for ACORN to lie", according to Andrew Breitbart founder of the BigGovernment.com Website where the video first appeared.
In television interviews James O'Keefe claimed none of the ACORN offices he visited at any point kicked him out when he asked his staged questions. That's a lie.
O'Keefe's partner an "aspiring journalist" Hannah Giles is the daughter of right wing media Website columnist Doug Giles - she didn't bother showing up to a CNN television interview looking into the "couple's" self-described prostitution scandal.
According to MediaMatters.org, reps from both the Baltimore and Philadelphia ACORN offices not only asked O'Keefe and Giles to leave, they also filed police reports about the incidents.
In a recently posted video available on Youtube (or watch it by clicking play on the upper right of this blog) the Philadelphia office director for ACORN Katherine Conway Russell asserts that James O'Keefe lied about who he was in order to gain entrance to the ACORN office.
So why are so many Congressmen so fired up about ACORN?
In response to this questionable video evidence, yesterday a majority of House Democrats and Republicans moved to cut federal funding for ACORN by passing H.R. 3221 - a recently added rider to the bill would cut off ACORN's funding.
Why would a rider on ACORN funding be hidden inside a bill for student aid?
Save for the fact that Barack Obama was a community organizer for the embattled group early in his career (prompting the GOP to seize on it as ammunition to discredit him and ridicule his record) I doubt many Americans would even have heard of ACORN, if not for the GOP's media attacks and misinformation campaign.
The Website of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, known as ACORN, describes it as a organizational platform centered around the needs of low-to-middle income families; but to hear some of the preachy Congressional rhetoric being tossed around recently, one might be led to think it's a cadre of satanists or some kind of socialist cult.
ACORN deals with a range of issues including affordable housing, living wages and affordable tax preparation services among other things.
ACORN started in the early 70's as a group seeking rights for welfare recipients. Their efforts to register voters during the 2008 presidential elections drew the ire of Republicans apparently disturbed at the thought of low and middle income American citizens exercising their right to vote.
Do sketchy contrived videos of undercover "journalists" strolling into ACORN store-front talking to a few members of a nationwide organization with thousands of volunteers automatically mean the entire organization is a fraud? Maybe not.
But the reality is that an organization is responsible for the people who work there; while ACORN has in fact done a lot to help economically disadvantaged people all over the country, the management should have done a better job training their employees and volunteers who staff their offices.
By not doing so, they've simply given conservatives an opportunity to mock and deride sincere community-based efforts to assist low and middle income Americans already on the periphery of our society.
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