George Graham

A Bumbling Misstep in America’s Unacknowledged Race War?

I’m sure you know by now that there’s an unacknowledged race war raging in America. In the vanguard are Rupert Murdoch’s pernicious Fox News and a plague of right-wing web sites, many funded by malignant multimillionaires.

A blatant example is the relentless persecution of a group called ACORN.

A pair of young spies (photo below) who claim to be journalists managed to entrap one or two ACORN employees into making damaging remarks.

Here’s an excerpt from Newsweek:

pimpWhat made the videos newsworthy is that (James) O’Keefe’s colleague, 20-year-old Hannah Giles, pretended to be a prostitute and, in some cases, told ACORN staff that she intended to set up a brothel. O’Keefe’s antics might have been dismissed as a clever college-age prank except that, with the help of veteran right-wing journalist Andrew Breitbart, who runs the biggovernment.org website, the videos became part of a right-wing campaign to destroy ACORN…

If my memory is accurate, one of the ACORN employees said she could see it was some kind of prank and was pretending to go along with it.

From the reaction in the right-wing blogosphere, Fox News – and members of Congress – you would have thought ACORN’s leaders had been caught trying to blow up an airplane.

Why? Because ACORN is the nation’s largest community organization providing aid and guidance to low- income families. And this being America, most of those families are black. Furthermore, ACORN had the nerve to help these people exercise their right to vote.

Throughout America’s 2008 general elections, the right-wing media harassed ACORN, claiming the group had committed voter fraud. The fraud turned out to be nothing more than false listings submitted (to ACORN but not passed on to election officials) by temporary workers who were being paid to collect voters’ names. The fraud was against ACORN – not by ACORN. But you’d never know it from the media reports.

You probably didn’t catch the follow-up stories on the O’Keefe saga. Those didn’t get much media play. So, in case you missed it, here’s the latest, as reported on Democrashield.com:

Last week, investigators released their report on the ACORN scandal.  They found that the community organizing group broke no laws in dealing with the undercover filmmakers.

We already knew that the filmmakers did a fair bit of editing before they made their videos public. But now it appears that they did much more than merely cut and paste the most  salacious bits together.

According to the investigator’s report, some of the audio in the videos turns out to have been dubbed, meaning that we don’t know what the ACORN employees were agreeing to since we don’t know what the undercover filmmakers were actually asking them.

Plus, exculpatory content that may have ameliorated the appearance of scandal was apparently left on the cutting-room floor.

o’keefeWell, it looks like O’Keefe (photos at right) and his pals are at it again. And this time they got nabbed. The FBI arrested the so-called journalist and three other young men this week, charging them with trying to wiretap Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu’s office in New Orleans.

You remember Landrieu? She is the Louisiana senator who traded her health-reform vote to Harry Reid in exchange for a promise of $100 million in Medicaid funds for her state.

My guess is that O’Keefe and his right-wing snoops were hoping to get some material he could edit into a video discrediting Medicaid. It’s just a guess, of course. But a lot of folks on Medicaid in Louisiana do happen to be black.

About the author

gwgraeme

I am a Jamaican-born writer who has lived and worked in Canada and the United States. I live in Lakeland, Florida with my wife, Sandra, our three cats and two dogs. I like to play golf and enjoy our garden, even though it's a lot of work. Since retiring from newspaper reporting I've written a few books. I also write a monthly column for Jamaicans.com