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| -Lurid Crime Tales- |
| ACORN: A Cautionary Tale |
| 2009-09-27 |
| Wendy Kaminer When is thievery not a crime but a personal tragedy? When is lying for personal gain or political expedience a mere error in judgment? The answer is obvious to any partisan. Your political enemies engage in criminal or morally repugnant acts; your allies, friends, and relations make mistakes or bend the rules for the greater good. As Rudolph Giuliani remarked during his presidential campaign, the definition of torture "depends on who does it." Waterboarding was "aggressive questioning," when Americans inflicted it. "It was a judgment call," (not a criminal conspiracy,) ACORN president Maud Hurd said in 2008, describing the decision to cover-up the embezzlement of nearly a million dollars by Dale Rathke, the brother of ACORN founder Wade Rathke. No, I don't mean to suggest that torture and embezzlement are moral equivalents. I do mean to state that activists, advocacy groups, politicians, and pundits, left and right, display equivalent moral hypocrisy when rationalizing illegal or unethical conduct by some of their own. It's the hypocrisy bred by the self-righteousness of people convinced that they're on the side of the angels, that their commitment to the right cause makes them incapable of doing wrong. It's the hypocrisy that led the ACLU national board to trivialize, misrepresent, or conceal serious misconduct by its staff and lay leaders (the subject of my book, Worst Instincts.) It's the hypocrisy that has consistently characterized the "progressive" response to recent and still unfolding ACORN scandals. By ignoring, minimizing, or rationalizing grossly unethical and even criminal conduct, ACORN's left-wing friends have harmed it more than its right wing enemies ever could. |
| Posted by:Fred |
| #1 Harshbarger was the prosecuting attorney in the Amirault case. He kept them in jail long after it had been demonstrated that they were innocent because he didn't want it on the record that he was the John Hathorne of the 20th century Witch Trials. Whatever he does, it should be viewed with skepticism. |
| Posted by: Nimble Spemble 2009-09-27 09:33 |