You have to hand to the right wing. It certainly gets worked up over the most bizarre things.
Take its fascination with ACORN, with an organization of volunteers that works in the nation’s poorest neighborhoods teaching its residents to help themselves and stand up for themselves. It certainly borders on the psychotic.
Does ACORN have problems? Yes. But as Joe Conason writes on Salon,
To claim that the stupid behavior of a half-dozen employees should discredit a national group with offices in more than 75 cities staffed by many thousands of employees and volunteers is like saying that Mark Sanford or John Ensign have discredited every Republican governor or senator.
The uproar over the hidden-camera fiasco — like the wing-nuttery of death panels and the tea-baggers — does nothing more than divert our attention from what really matters. After all, if we’re talking about ACORN, we’re not talking about the nearly 50 million Americans without health coverage, the spiking unemployment rate, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, torture and all of the other things about which we should be talking.
Hank Kalet 