This is a quote from Glenn Greenwald's column on Salon.com, the same article Joy quoted from. Joy, I think you should have shown the paragraph as a quote; otherwise it looks as if you worded it that way yourself.
Earlier this week, I wrote about how the Fox-News/Glenn-Beck/Rush-Limbaugh leadership trains its protesting followers to focus the vast bulk of their resentment and anxieties on largely powerless and downtrodden factions, while ignoring, and even revering, the outright pillaging by virtually omnipotent corporate interests that own and control their Government (and, not coincidentally, Fox News).
Shall we talk about insulting? According to Mr. Greenwald, if I give any credence to Fox News or Beck or Limbaugh, then I'm a "trained follower" who "reveres" the "omnipotent corporate interests" which actually run the Federal government. (If that's true, how'd they let Obama in?) The strong implication is that I'm a zombie who can't think independently and who is protesting against ACORN because my puppet masters told me to.
And Mr. Greenwald seems to think that the ACORN scandal has been welcomed by the conservative nutjobs because it distracts from the health care debate and pulls energy and time away from the righteous efforts to protect the uninsured from being uninsured. Not only that, but if I do disagree, I'm helping to hold down the poor and unfortunate who would be the main beneficiaries of the health care reform's largess.
That's crap.
I am upset about ACORN because the organization has been accused of voter fraud in our last national election and because they really did register a number of dead and indigent "voters" in the registration drive (typical Chicago-style machine politics; been going on since the Roaring Twenties). Now we have videos of some of their staffers (some of whom have by now been fired) telling people how to run illegal businesses and dodge Federal taxes. This organization was going to participate materially in the 2010 census, which would have given the criminals in the organization (I don't believe that everybody in ACORN is a crook) the opportunity to influence the population count upwards in heavily Democratic districts and downwards in heavily Republican districts.
The amount of money they got isn't what makes me angry, it's the demonstrated lack of ethics in the organization. If one claims not to trust conservatives because of the money problems in Iraq and Afghanistan (they're real and someone should be held accountable for every penny), then that one should apply the same ethical standards to ACORN. Outrage over unethical behavior shouldn't have any kind of dollar amount test attached to it. To do one and not the other smacks of partisan politics, no matter which outrage one vents over.
Wendy, the FOX news complaints about the recent protest not being covered refers to outlets directed to the US audience. I, for one, looked for mentions of the protest in the mainstream media and found few. And the ones I found were mostly dismissive or negative in tone. I'm glad you got to see them, because you're more informed than most Americans who
didn't watch FOX were at the time. (That doesn't mean that there wasn't coverage, it just means that I had a hard time finding it. And I shouldn't have.)
And I echo the request to call them "Tea Parties" and not to use the other term. It's very close to a vulgar reference to a male homosexual act, and it has been used by those in the media who wish to insult and disparage the protesters. And I didn't know the term before all this came up. I wish I had continued in my ignorance on that particular subject.
