Covering Up for ACORN

I assess former Massachusetts Attorney General Scott Harshbarger’s report on ACORN in this morning’s American Spectator.

From the top of the article:

The newly released “independent” review of the ACORN undercover prostitution video saga is a breathtakingly audacious work of fiction.

There is hardly a word of truth to be found anywhere in the document’s 47 pages. The report unveiled yesterday by former Massachusetts Attorney General Scott Harshbarger is an all-you-can-eat buffet of lies and distortions that faults ACORN only for poor management practices.

No wonder those who organized the news teleconference yesterday kept the event so brief. The call lasted just 36 minutes, an amazingly brief period considering the level of public interest in ACORN’s ongoing scandals and the complexity of the issues involved. Within that, the question-and-answer session was barely 23 minutes long.

Only five reporters were called upon and four of them lobbed softballs. One of the so-called reporters was actually politics professor Peter Dreier of Occidental College, a consultant to ACORN who wrote a report blaming the media for the group’s woes. In “First They Came for ACORN,” one of Dreier’s over-the-top Huffington Post op-eds, the radical academic likened ACORN critics to Nazis.

Although I joined the electronic queue to ask a question, the teleconference was abruptly cut off after John Fund of the Wall Street Journal asked a series of tough questions.

Nonetheless the conference call was revealing.  […]