It is pretty tough to find someone in the media, no matter how liberal, spinning in favor of ACORN which has been widely recognized for perpetrating voter fraud on a mass scale. However, one Glenn W. Smith manages to attempt ACORN spin in an Editor & Publisher column. First Smith tries to turn the tables by alleging that it is Repubicans, not ACORN, that is engaged in vote fraud by "unfairly" pointing out violations (emphasis mine):
They exploit lingering unease among the poor and minorities who, with some justification, believe themselves to suffer disproportionately from unbalanced wheels of justice in America. These innocents know they don't have to commit crimes to be accused of crimes. Better to stay away from the places where the accusations might be leveled. Like the polls.
The allegations can also help cover up actual election fraud undertaken on behalf of McCain. This is the tactic Karl Rove learned so well from his right-wing predecessors: accuse your opponent of your own unethical or illegal acts.
Get it? The accusations of vote fraud against ACORN are nothing more than a tactic in covering up vote fraud by Republicans...at least in Smith's fervid leftwing imagination. Smith then serves up a completely irrelevant example of "voter suppression" from over 70 years ago:
As reported by Mitchell, in the 1934 race for governor of California, Republicans hatched perhaps the most sophisticated voter suppression scheme undertaken up to that time in America. Taking the shrewd advice of a former New York prosecutor, Eli Whitney Debevoise, opponents of Democrat Upton Sinclair leveled wild charges of voter registration fraud. A cooperative district attorney drew up a secret list of 200,000 allegedly illegal registrants.
The Los Angeles Times advanced the suppression campaign, writing on the front page that "it would be far better for a few honest persons to lose their votes than for a hundred thousand rogues to defeat by fraud the majority will of the people." The publicity, the conspirators knew, would frighten those who were afraid they just might be on that list. Rather than risk capture (for a vague crime they had no understanding of), they'd stay away from the polls.
What this has to do with the modern day election fraud committed by ACORN, I don't know, but it seems to give some comfort to Smith to cite a California campaign from 3 generations ago to try to focus attention away from the ACORN antics of today. Smith concludes his spin with a plea to the media to just quit paying attention to ACORN fraud and concentrate on those big bad Republicans whose crime is voter suppression whenever they point out the ACORN crimes.
Isn't it finally time for the media to drop the habit and turn its attention to anti-democratic voter suppression tactics they know are anti-democratic? Isn't it time they dropped their complicity in voter suppression schemes? The ACORN controversy would be a good place to start.
One can get an idea of just how much Glenn W. Smith is divorced from reality by reading a description of his book, "The Politics of Deceit," in Amazon:
From political ads and talk shows to mainstream media reporting, Glenn Smith shows how American political discourse is now dominated by carefully scripted images and rhetoric-most of which benefit the Republicans and their corporate allies. The result is public apathy toward politics-and a real threat to American freedom.
Yeah, yeah. We all know just how much those evil Republicans dominate MSNBC, NBC, CBS, ABC, and PBS to such an extent that they faithfully relay their "carefully scripted images." And a big hello to Glenn W. Smith writing from the fifth dimension in the alternate reality.
