ACORN’s Useful Idiots

My latest article in the American Spectator is “ACORN’s Useful Idiots.”

Here’s the top of it:

Some defenders of ACORN are blind. Some are useful idiots.

They say ACORN means well despite the ongoing scandal related to an undercover video sting operation. In it, now-fired ACORN employees across America advised two young people pretending to be a pimp and a prostitute on how to set up an underage illegal alien sex slave ring.

ACORN backers say — as they have always without fail said whenever ACORN faces an employee-related scandal — that the workers were just a few bad apples and that ACORN is focused, as Democratic strategist Paul Begala says, on improving “the real lives of real people.”

There are useful idiots and then there’s Joe Conason who ought to know better. He’s just whining now because the right has finally learned the power of political theater.

Even as evidence mounts that ACORN is a criminal organization, the longtime Bill Clinton apologist brushes aside legitimate concerns about the group in a column on Salon.com.

Trekking into new frontiers of denial and dishonesty, Conason blames ACORN’s recent troubles on the political right: “Like so many conservative attacks, the crusade against ACORN has been highly exaggerated and even falsified to create a demonic image that bears little resemblance to the real organization.” […]