Thursday, September 17, 2009

Gold Medal Mental Gymnastics on the Left

by Smitty

Joe Conason at Salon:
The right-wing crusade against ACORN is a far bigger fraud than any misdeeds a few employees might have committed
Any? A few? Doesn't the sight of the one bit of vermin make you at least mildly curious about what's lurking out of sight, Mr. Conason?

People on the left, perhaps not Conason himself, are calling for Bush administration heads on a silver platter over some water boarding. Doesn't the non-zero possibility, based upon the video evidence, of some underage girls living in horror at least budge the concern meter? One can hypothesize an existence so horrid that captive girls would cheerfully endure a session of water boarding in exchange for liberation.
Yet ACORN's troubles should be considered in the context of a history of honorable service to the dispossessed and impoverished.
What I really want, since Mr. Conason is apparently my ethical superior, and has a higher-order grasp of justice than my cheap, pedestrian morality, is some kind of function that shows exactly how one calculates the acceptable ratio of depravity vs. "honorable service to the dispossessed and impoverished".

I'll leave un-played the standard "if conservatives did it..." card.

The overall WTF that needs to be addressed is the chain-of-command issue. Why, pray tell, does money have to be extracted from the taxpayer, or borrowed from the future, and then depart the Treasury to ACORN, which seems tantamount to a Federal agency? Why should money leave DC and ever be directed at individual private citizens in the ACORN fashion?

Mr. Conason is naïvel, and his mental gymnastics constitute sad entertainment for all.

Update: Carol at No Sheeples gives us the Nutcracker: sweet.

9 comments:

  1. I am not entirely convinced that there IS a history of "honorable service to the dispossessed and impoverished".

    I suggest that whatever "service" so provided is an accidental by-product of pursuing their real agenda, the transformation of America into a socialist nation.

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  2. Stacy, congratulations, you done got linked at pandagon in the first and as yet Vaginer Warrior mention of the ACORN controversy:

    http://pandagon.net/index.php/site/comments/meet_your_investigative_team_that_must_be_smoking_cracker_crack_investigati/

    As would please a man of your reichwing status, Manhanda construes your non-faggoty reaction to young Hannah Giles' comeliness as "violent." (comment 5)

    Overall, they are choosing to deal with this by way of the "Master Thespian!" defense after ACORN abandoned it.

    Oh Frabjous Day! Calou Callay!

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  3. @Alec,
    Yes, I picked that Pandagon.net link up for the FMJRA via Common Sense Political Thought. Thank you, sir.

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  4. Oh, my apologies, Smitty - for some reason I thought Stacy posted this one.

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  5. I must correct one point in your article. Liberals and Democrats (apparently the same thing, according to Rasmussen polling) combine all Republicans and all conservatives (obviously not the same thing, according to Rasmussen polling) into a single group, called Republicans.

    I hope you don't mind if I shamelessly plug my site here, but I wrote about that polling data and the Democrat disconnect. A search of ... Democrats just ... in my searchbox will add more stuff I think is worth reading.

    They don't "tu quoque" conservatives, but rather Republicans, which they wrongly think mean "conservatives."

    And quite frankly, the history of someone's 5 drunk-driving conviction troubles has nothing whatsoever to do with whether he puts a nickel into the plate come Sunday or not. Batting .300 is only superstar quality in major league baseball. Not in real life. Leftist kooks really need to get that straight.

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  6. "Joe Conason writes a weekly column for Salon and the New York Observer. His new book is "It Can Happen Here: Authoritarian Peril in the Age of Bush."

    What is "it" Joe?

    Perhaps some fascism, some Nazi stuff, some good old dictatorship-type stuff? Some sort of, like, limiting of freedom, some nationalization, some stuff like that?

    Some czars running things, some sneaky shit, some underage prostitution, some theft, some unaccountability, some sort of thug fascism and stuff like giving speeches every day and scaring people into support?

    You got it right Joe, so right, and correct, because you are very smart. And Rev Dr Jerry Wright is a former Marine who has done so much for the poor, he is not a racist.

    Joe Conason is the grease trap under Chris Matthews' $30,000 personal deep fryer.

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  7. Proof of Honorable service to the dispossessed and impoverished:

    I once saw an ACORNer swerve to miss a kitten while transporting underage sex slaves across the border.

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  8. You can't defraud an honest man.

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  9. "... history of honorable service to the dispossessed and impoverished." What a curious formula. "Dispossessed" doesn't mean people who don't have anything; it means people who once had something and have had it taken away. "Impoverished" doesn't just mean poor people, it means people who weren't poor but have been made poor. What people are these? My understanding was that ACORN dealt with people who didn't have anything, and never had anything, and that was their beef.

    And, of course, he cites no instances of this "honorable history". ACORN is chiefly famous for making loud noises at demonstrations and voter registration fraud; if Conasan has some evidence that ACORN is up to something beyond that, I'm sure we'd all like to see it.

    Apparently, with some people good intentions and fine-sounding objectives substitutes for actual accomplishment on a one-for-one basis.

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