ACORN fights back

If you've been wondering how ACORN and its mainstream media allies were going to try to rescue the criminal community organization from the avalanche of trouble that two young conservative investigative journalists and their hidden camera have brought upon it here is your answer:

LOS ANGELES (AP) - Much of America discovered James O'Keefe III and Hannah Giles through their hidden-camera, make-believe pimp and prostitute videos of ACORN employees giving advice about establishing a brothel with underage hookers.

But as far back as 2006 - well before the videos became a national sensation and conservative rallying cry - the fresh-faced O'Keefe and Giles connected with a pair of Washington conservative institutions that boast programs training ideological journalists.

Now, due to coordinated promotion of the undercover sting footage by influential players in the conservative media, Giles and O'Keefe have gone from part of the pack to movement superstars.

Giles, a 20-year-old sophomore at Florida International University, spent the summer on a $1,200-a-month internship with the National Journalism Center, a training organization whose alumni include conservative commentator Ann Coulter. Immediately after graduating Rutgers University in 2006, O'Keefe, 25, was paid to set up magazines and newspapers on university campuses for the Leadership Institute, which recruits potential conservative public policy and media stars.

Each has other credentials that place them squarely in the network of activists who believe liberal-leaning mainstream media willfully ignore stories that illustrate the failings of the political left and its leaders.

. . . On Wednesday it [ACORN] sued O'Keefe, Giles and Breitbart over the Baltimore video, saying Maryland law requires consent to create sound recordings.Brian Kettenring, deputy director of national operations for ACORN, contended that conservative media , including Fox, was behind the project.

"O'Keefe and Giles try to make it sound as if they concocted their sordid video scheme on a whim - as if they had no major backers," Kettenring said. "ACORN's lawsuit will smoke out the true motives and conservative money behind these attacks on a community organization that works to better the lives of ordinary Americans every day."

First of all what is so "sordid" about a couple of journalists checking up on an organization which has received millions and is slated to receive billions of dollars of taxpayer money?

Especially when that organization already has a long history of criminal activity?

Those of you who are old enough may remember those days when the CBS television show 60 Minutes sometimes acted as something other than a propaganda tool for the far left. In that vanished bygone age they would do things exactly like this to expose corruption and inform the public.

But back to ACORN's pathetic attempt to deflect attention from the essentially criminal nature of their organization.

ACORN's contention is that if it can be demonstrated that Giles and O'Keefe have ever in their lives spoken to anyone who knows Glenn Beck or anyone else who works at FOX News or if they have in the past ever had any contact with any kind of conservative organization then their project is illegitimate.

First of all the issue is what the video tapes reveal about the mindset and operating principles of ACORN and its employees NOT who originally thought up the sting.

Second, ACORN and its allies have not provided one shred of evidence that the project did not begin exactly as Ms. Giles describes it. The fact that she and Mr. O'Keefe spoke with some members of the media about how to best reveal the results of their investigation means nothing other than the fact that they are intelligent.

Giles and O'Keefe knew that the mainstream media and all of the cable news channels except FOX have become nothing more than the propaganda organs of the far left. They knew that if they released all of the video tapes they shot in various ACORN offices at the same time that while the conservative media would make a big deal of it for a couple of days but the mainstream media would ignore it. The news cycle would move on and the story would be effectively buried.

By rolling out the tapes one after another over a period of days the MSM's willful ignorance became both manifest and embarrassing and the Democrat controlled congress, which would have loved to pretend that this story did not exist, was forced to take action.

Now both the Census Bureau and the IRS have severed their ties to the corrupt organization and congress has stripped them of federal funds (goodbye billions of stimulus dollars).

ACORN as an organization is so far to the political left that from where they are standing Barack Obama looks mainstream. The fact that ACORN believes that its salvation lies in proving that Giles and O'Keefe had some kind of conservative backing is very revealing. It would seem that to them the truth of an accusation has absolutely no relevance. The only thing that matters is who is making the charge, what are their motives and who do they associate with.

It isn't going to work. When ACORN employees didn't bat an eye at the prospect of helping a pimp bring 13-year-old girls into the country to use as sex slaves they removed themselves so far beyond the pale that they will never be able to find their way back.