Mighty Oaks

From little acorns grow; some pretty tall tales too. It' s begun to taper off, but still I hear sotto voce advice from people revealing that ACORN got Obama elected and their efforts weren't exactly on the up and up. I hear it often.

Of course we remember John McCain's exercises in the fallacy of distraction, one of which had Obama tied to massive voter fraud and ACORN thereby negating his large lead in the polls. Nobody has a better motive for alleging voter fraud than someone with a documented history of cheating of course. There were indeed thousands of bad signatures in the million or so registrations the group submitted, but of course the idea that the folks who signed up as Mighty Mouse and Bugs Bunny ever actually tried to vote under that name is laughably devoid of evidence. Some of the dung flung at Obama still sticks however, even after demonstrations of how easy it has been to erase blocks of votes along with any evidence of the erasure from Diebold machines.

Obama won so handily that the question is now moot if not exactly forgotten. His alleged connections with the organization never really materialized and the pot and pan banging hoopla didn't survive the dip into the frigid water of defeat. But the snickerers and nudgers and whisperers still wink and raise their eyebrows, knowing We'd never have Obama without ACORN.

So what's that subversive, anti-American, Liberal crew of cheats and conspirators up to now? Why, nefarious attempts to help a disabled vet keep his house from being foreclosed and renegotiate his loan before he's tossed out, wheelchair and all. How typical! How Marxist! How hard to reconcile it with the Republican bullshit about supporting the troops and about how "liberals" don't. Those damned Liberals!

Watch and weep

Many of us are going to get a government handout this month; you know, the kind of thing the Republicans have usually treated as another form of the Socialist Plague when the dollars are directed toward indigent children. For a good number of those recipients, that money will go not to purchase the Japanese cars, Korean televisions and Chinese everything else that we're being told is an economic stimulus plan that will prevent the recession that has already happened. For most, I think, it won't go to pay down the crippling debt or to pay for needed medical care, but to buy gasoline; the indispensable substance of a nation with the poorest public transportation system in the civilized world.

Our Bushtopia can always find a way to get you to buy oil, no matter who suffers in the process and they're very good at making it sound like patriotism. Of course real patriotism has little to do with lapel pins or stupid looking plastic flag holders clipped to SUV windows or yellow "Support the Troops" ribbons, and while you're pouring your government handout into the tank of your 7000 pound monument to fashionable folly, remember who is suffering and dying so that you can exercise your plastic patriotism.

Remember the men and women living in dirt and filth and blood for year after year until they either die or are discharged with a "personality disorder" like shrapnel in the skull, so as to deprive them of decent medical attention and the support they deserve. If you want -- if you really want to see how Uncle Scam treats our "heroes" when they return home to wait to be sent back for another 15 months watch this video. Watch all ten minutes of it and consider taking the hush money George is sending you and using it to defeat each and every Republican candidate with the gall to support this sham government and its sham war. Use that money to make sure not one of these criminals gets another term; these thugs who get free medical care, large pensions and all they can squeeze from the suffering citizens, abused soldiers and victims of American aggression. Watch it and weep.