ACORN & the GOP: Pots & Kettles

So now there’s some dirt on ACORN, and what dirt it is! It’s like an episode of Law & Order; the kind where you shake your head at the TV and say, “This wouldn’t happen in real life.” ACORN leaders (and Nancy Pelosi, FWIW) claim the nastiness was only a few people in low positions, and that the organization itself would never condone such slimy tactics. Exactly like the response of the military and Presidency in the Abu Ghraib prison abuse debacle, actually.

The ever-vigilant GOP has demanded (and the Democrats are on the bandwagon almost as fast) that ACORN be punished. One of our great American traditions is to punish organizations by taking away their federal moneys. And I think that works. For organizations, money is like food and water; removing it gets them where it hurts. Awesomely, however, some overzealous Republicans, who apparently didn’t realize they were not supposed to upset the status quo, drafted a bill that would withhold funds from ALL federally-funded organizations with fraud complaints against them.

As anyone who pays attention might have predicted, this broad criterion turned up a nearly comprehensive list of military industrial contractors (i.e., Haliburton, Lockheed-Martin, Northrup-Grumman, and so on). Some of them have literally dozens of fraud charges against them There’s an unofficial list here, created at the behest of a freshman Congressman from Florida named Grayson.

Naturally, I don’t believe any of those massive, multibillion-dollar corporations will have any of their money cut, even if their fraud amounts to thousands of times more than ACORN’s. The Republicans will howl, and the Democrats will get all conciliatory, and everyone will work out a deal whereby the corrupt community organizers are cut off from the Federal teat, while the corrupt weapons manufacturers will get a maternal nip on the nose and then be ushered back to the privileged sucking spots. The military-industrial complex is implicated in the careers of quite a number of our congresspersons on both sides of the aisle, and (in a not-unrelated note) we Americans, by and large, are more tolerant of organizations that build bombers than of those that build communities, all frauds being equal.

Still, even if the consequences of this little drama are painfully predictable, stupid human tricks like this give me unwholesome giggles of political amusement. It’s nothing more sophisticated, really, than the thrill of watching a 5-year-old get pwned on the playground when he realizes that for every finger pointing at the other kid, three more are pointing back in his own face.