The Media Must Be Trembling in Their Stamford Loafers

Over at the NY Times, Tobin Harshaw is having a field day examining the ACORN fallout and the angst some in the media may be feeling about being "scooped" by a couple of kids playing dress-up and parlaying their particularly unconvincing drag into a so-what Allan Funt piece with the co-operation of a few dimbulbs.  For some reason I hesitate to anticipate that this will be the end of mainstream media as we know it. If this is the worst the fringe right can come up with to prove the rot at the core of liberal philosphy, I think we can all sleep tight tonight.  But it certainly gave our Congress something new to posture about, and hey, only a million or so poor people will be hurt, so it's not like it did any harm, eh?  This was my comment on the Opinionator website:

"So have you asked yourself, during this gleeful tirade, “Why ACORN, if the goal is uncovering wrongdoing amongst private groups getting public funds?”

Because this is truly small fry, toss-it-back-in-the-water stuff. The amount of funding, compared to where much taxpayer money goes, is paltry. Huge corporations engaging in criminal conspiracies, in-your-face ripoffs and outright murder and rape (Goldman-Sachs, AIG, Halliburton, KBR, Blackwater for starters) not only have not been held to account, but continue to siphon billions off the public tit with impunity. So why all the pearl-clutching about a few boneheads making bad decisions out of an organization of thousands?

Oh, silly me…the faces of ACORN are poor and black and the goal of the group is to help the weak. That makes them easy to grind into the dust. Those others? Well, they have powerful white men running them, don’t they? And they pull the strings in Congress, just as they always have.

The fact that the mainstream media failed to “uncover” what was hardly worth a couple paragraphs at the back of Section B is not an embarrassment to them. Rather, it’s an embarrassment to the whole country that we can get so worked up about this, while we once again beat up the poor and venerate the growing plutocracy that is our government."

  Feh.