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September 09, 2008

Obama & ACORN: Old Media Negligence on Parade

Lee Cary
How come the old big media has ignored Barack Obama’s association with the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN)?

American Thinker writers, including Patrick Casey and Rick Moran, have addressed Obama’s links to ACORN. 

And, last May 29, Stanley Kurtz, National Review Online (NRO) Contributing Editor & Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, wrote a article profiling Obama’s affiliation with ACORN and offering plenty of follow-up leads to aspiring big media reporters looking for a story.  No significant takers.

Old big media has had very little to say about the topic. It’s as though they just as soon not bring it up.

But the Obama Campaign hasn’t been silent about Kurtz, whom they characterize as a “slimy character assassin.” In case you missed it, Ben Smith, writing (Aug 27) for POLITICO, reported on the Obama Campaign’s efforts to thwart Kurtz’s plans to appear on a Chicago radio station.

“And tonight, the [Obama] campaign launched a more specific campaign: an effort to disrupt the appearance by a writer for National Review, Stanley Kurtz, on a Chicago radio program....

The campaign e-mailed Chicago supporters who had signed up for the Obama Action Wire with detailed instructions including the station's telephone number and the show's extension, as well as a research file on Kurtz, which seems to prove that he's a conservative, which isn't in dispute…
‘Tell WGN that by providing Kurtz with airtime, they are legitimizing baseless attacks from a smear-merchant and lowering the standards of political discourse,’ says the email, which picks up a form of pressure on the press pioneered by conservative talk radio hosts and activists in the 1990s, and since adopted by Media Matters and other liberal groups.

‘It is absolutely unacceptable that WGN would give a slimy character assassin like Kurtz time for his divisive, destructive ranting on our public airwaves. At the very least, they should offer sane, honest rebuttal to every one of Kurtz's lies,’ it continues.”

These are tactics also common to Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, and ACORN’s historical efforts to disrupt their opposition. That doesn’t make their behaviors always illegal. But it should give a heads-up to reporters covering the McCain-Palin campaign as well as election officials (Jimmy Carter?) who will be poll-watching in November.

Poll watchers should remember that ACORN has a proven track record for promoting voter fraud. And, that Chicago’s Daley Machine, in particular, has the demonstrated election-day ability to resurrect the dead, enabling them to vote once again.

In the meantime, how long can it be before there’s an ACORN-sponsored effort, more substantial than Code Pink’s Republican Convention disruptive theatrics, to disturb a McCain-Palin rally? For as Obama fades, his radical allies may emerge in force, and not quietly.

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