No, Professor Dreier. ACORN Kicked Its Own Ass!

by Matthew Vadum

Professional radical shill Peter Dreier, an Occidental College professor, has been very busy writing propaganda for his paying customer ACORN in recent days. Dreier is the driving force behind the “Cry Wolf” project, a push to encourage academics to help spread more lies about the corrupt group.

Now, taking a cue from America’s BP-Asskicking-Commander-In-Chief, Dreier affectionately oozes that the dissolving ACORN assaulted posteriors like nobody else. There was “[n]o group [that] was better at kicking ass,” Dreier writes.

What Dreier should have written was that there is no group better than ACORN – at kicking its own ass!

PeterDreier_ACORNsProstitute

In a review of his friend John Atlas’s new institutional hagiography of ACORN, Seeds of Change, Dreier writes that ACORN brass “expected Obama’s victory in 2008 to give the organization even greater influence.”

But the New York Times and eeevil right-wingers spoiled the party.

Dreier and Atlas advance the positively ludicrous argument that the New York Times –which for the most part refused to cover ACORN’s troubles – somehow had something to do with ACORN’s fall. Really, they argue that, presumably with a straight face.

But the Vast Right Wing ConspiracyTM really did ACORN in. Really.

Soon after Obama was inaugurated, “ACORN became the target of a right-wing assault that it was unprepared for and, ultimately, unable to survive,” Dreier writes.

Without a scintilla of credible evidence Dreier argues that ACORN’s demise was “engineered in part by Karl Rove, George W. Bush’s top political advisor, who saw in ACORN’s successful large-scale voter registration efforts a real threat to GOP candidates.”

As someone who has followed ACORN very closely in recent years, I can say with complete confidence that Dreier and Atlas don’t know what they’re talking about.

Rove might very well have wanted ACORN to die, but in fact the organization saved him the trouble by committing suicide.

No sinister right-wing conspiracy forced Wade Rathke’s brother Dale to embezzle a million dollars.

No sinister right-wing conspiracy forced Rathke to cover up the theft for eight years until it was discovered in mid-2008.

No sinister right-wing conspiracy forced ACORN employees across the nation to offer assistance to two camera-wielding undercover activists who claimed they needed help in setting up a brothel for underage illegal alien prostitutes.

No sinister right-wing conspiracy forced the Democrat-controlled Congress last September to vote to cut off all federal funding to the group.

No sinister right-wing conspiracy forced President Obama, whose close ties to ACORN are exhaustively documented, to sign the funding ban into law.

By the way, Dreier’s sleight-of-hand is part of a plan hatched by ACORN to try to cover up the sordid group’s decades of wrongdoing by downplaying aspects of it’s history and erasing other aspects altogether. ACORN cares about its image deeply because it is planning to reemerge after the next election, a fact Atlas acknowledges in his book.

ACORN online campaign director Nathan Henderson-James wrote in February that the revisionist project was underway.

“[T]here will be a fight over the narrative of ACORN’s demise,” he wrote to members of Townhouse, an invitation-only forum run by Matt Stoller, senior policy adviser to Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.). The other side wants “a narrative about the corruption of popular organizations and how they are simply vehicles for the personal enrichment and power fantasies of their top staff members while pushing public policies that destroy middle America.”

Don’t forget to send your invoice to Nathan, Professor Dreier.

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Posted Jun 24th 2010 at 12:36 pm in ACORN | 69 Comments