Sunday, September 20, 2009

Errol Louis: ACORN Fiasco Not Over Yet

Employees from ACORN allegedly advised people posing as prostitutes and pimps how to cheat on taxes.

Employees from ACORN allegedly advised people posing as prostitutes and pimps how to cheat on taxes.

 

The videos shot and distributed by a pair of right-wing pranksters to discredit ACORNhad all the elements of a good political hit job: sleaze, sensationalism, sleight-of-hand.

James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles went from one ACORN community office to another posing as a pimp and his whore, pretending to seek help securing low-income housing and/or tax help to set up a brothel using underage illegal immigrants.

Not one ACORN outlet actually completed or filed illegal paperwork, but the video stunt worked like a charm anyway.

A few ACORN workers - out of a staff of 600 - gave the undercover filmmakers advice about ways to further their lurid prostitution scheme.

That is all it took. A full-scale witch hunt is underway against ACORN - and that means normal standards of proof, evidence and rationality get tossed out the window.

Biased and/or naive news producers and editors rushed one-minute excerpts of O'Keefe and Giles' heavily edited videos onto national television without a thought, even when the pair refused to release the full tapes or answer questions on the air about how they were created.

Click to read.

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