There is a new Republican Talking Point (TP) out there, and it has been noted in other diaries. The meme is that "lazy minorities" created this economic mess. Some Rethugs are taking it a step further and saying that, you got it, community organizers are the problem by encouraging the poor (i,e, minorities) to take bad loans. My point is this: In their reckless abandon to throw off any kind of responsibility on their behalf, they have handed us a new meme that we can use to pin them to the wall. Here is how we do it:
"They're saying YOU caused this mess! The middle class! Not the de-regulators in Congress or the Bush Administration who has been in charge for the last eight years. Not Wall Street Fat Cats. You're the problem! Talk about out of touch!"
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Here's Michelle Malkin , among others at National Review, helping the TP find its legs:
Where does the candidate of Hope and Change — the candidate of Reform and New Politics — stand on the issue? Barack Obama, ACORN’s senator, is for more of the same old, same old subsidizing of far-left politics in the name of fighting for the poor while enriching ideological cronies. That’s the Chicago way.
Here the acronym ACORN rears its head. According to Wikipedia, ACORN stands for Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. The organization has around 350,000 members, and is dedicated to community issues, especially fighting against predatory lending and advocating for low-income people regarding housing issues.
Where Obama comes into play is that, in 1992, he directed a voter registration drive by ACORN's sister organiztion, Project Vote, and successfully added over 150,000 African-Americans to the voter registration rolls.
ACORN and Project Vote are huge organizations. And they represent everything right-wingers hate, including wage reform, accessible education, bank regulation, gun control, and registering minorities to vote.
How Maulkin & Co. are playing this against Obama is by trying to make ACORN and Project Vote look like a voter fraud organization. All in all, since 2004, fifteen individual members of ACORN have been either indicted by grand jury or found guilty of voter fraud, and all claims against Project Vote have been dismissed.
Obviously any form of voter fraud is unacceptable, but Obama has never been personally linked to any of this, though the right is attempting to do so through insinuation. It all becomes a bunch of GOP gobbledy-goo. Obama was once a leader in Project Vote, which is a sister organization to ACORN, and since 0.00004% of ACORN's membership has done unethical things, then obviously we have a big problem here. And perhaps Kevin Bacon will be the next secretary of state, by this degrees-of-freedom approach to implicating someone.
This morning this all came to roost in my state of Missouri. John Danforth, in an interview for NPR, said he would be in Kansas City on election day to make sure Project Vote doesn't pull any shenanigans. Fine, but let's make sure that people who are legally entitled to vote actually get the chance, Jack.
Anyway, since the average person votes identity and not by logic or reason, I know I will be using the above tack when I hear this TP from Rethugs. It's an easy way to shine a spotlight on the depravity of the Rethug philosophy and show how this line of thought will ultimately be a dead end to them.