Bricker the troll

The BBQ Pit
161

ACORN is a loose agglomeration of organizations, which mostly have a large percentage of hippie do-gooders in what passes for control. ACORN itself is similarly “led.” It’s like cats herding cats herding more cats, but they’re mostly harmless, and mostly just trying to scam enough money for a bottle of Mad Dog, or formula for Junior. You guys expect us to not tar the entire GOP because of what a few rogue elements do, though they often promote violence. We ask that you be nice to our harmless hippies because we clean up after them. Or somebody else does. Which is part of their job, anyway. And isn’t part of ACORN’s job, though they try.

ETA an epiphany: Shodan, Bricker, and the others, as respectable members of the community and, therefore, never hung out with hippie activists! Guys, you are sadly unfamiliar with the brand of earthy earnestness tempered by naivety they bring to the table. That Obama is as worldly as he is still surprises me. Cuz guys, we’ve been laughing at them as long as you have, though our laughter is more affectionate, like laughing at an adorable Maltese barking at a trespasser.

162

I am late to this thread.

I don’t really care that much.

Rarely however, you just have to stop and acknowledge when a post is this awesome.

163

Hamlet, it’s a shame that the Democrats would have to resort to such blatant voter fraud. If only there were some example of an equivalent Republican voter fraud. Not even one example!

164

They got fired every damn time. They get fined. The office manager loses his job. ACORN does not back registration fraud. It is not their policy. It is expressly against their rules. But they pay 8 bucks an hour for people to get registrations. If they fail, they could lose their jobs so some people padded registrations because they needed the job.
ACORN has to turn them in. You never know what weird names people have. They do flag the suspicious ones telling them to especially check those ones.

165

And in this thread, folks, Ludovic has taken on the role of Ed McMahon to Hamlet’s Johnny Carson.

166

Maybe so, but if the dog won’t hunt, why are they trying so hard to kill it?

I got a similar attitude towards ACORN, but consider their enemies. A whole lot of effort has gone into sticking it to them. Wouldn’t be much of a stretch to call it a conspiracy, maybe none at all. We already know that much of the US Attorney firing scandals touch on ACORN, a case could be made that these scandals are nothing more than the most recent development in an ongoing effort by the Pubbies to kill ACORN.

Now, if you and I were right, then its a wasted effort, hunting a hornet with an elephant gun, hell, a howitzer! But they sure seem to take it pretty darn serious. Enemies are very reliable indicator of character and effectiveness.

Bear in mind, they are keepers of an old-time lefty tradition, going way back to the labor movement, the flame most kept alive by the late Saul Alinsky: don’t agonize, organize!

What if they’re right, and us smartasses are wrong? What if their efforts were finally bearing fruit? Tonight on Rachel Maddow, David Iglesias said pretty much that: that he was fired from his US Att position for not finding prosecutable offenses against ACORN because ACORN was turning Arizona blue. (Paraphrased and condensed for impact, watch it yourself you think I’m making it up…)

I’m thinking I’ was missing the gestalt here because I underestimated the effectiveness of ACORN, patted them on the head and patronized them. But maybe the Pubbies are right, and they are dangerous to them.

I guess I could bear the shame of being wrong. After all, it was only once…

167

Still telling lies, eh, Sam?

from your own link:

So, it wasn’t ACORN. The reason the fraudulent registrations were even known about was because ACORN reported them. You continue to tell lies and untruths.

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Actually they do it in remarkably low numbers considering how many get hired, and calling them “ACORN employees” is a bit of a stretch. They’re temp workers hired off the streets to work for a day or for a few hours. ACORN does not have the supernatural ability to know which of these people will try to rip them off, nor do they have the resources or the time to do extensive background checks on people who are hired to man a table outside a supermarket for a few hours and ask people if they want to register to vote.

In the long run, a few bogus registrations forms represent little more than a minor paperwork nuisance, and the money that would be required to vet these temp workers would come to more than what they’re scamming, and would have very little chance of identifying likely scammers beforehand in any case.

Trying to extropolate this kind of chickenshit hustling by a few day workers into actual corruption on ACORN’s part (the agency which is both the victim and the reporter of these surprisingly rare incindents) is laughably disingenuous, grasping and nakedly partisan, ESPECIALLY when this phony concern is being expressed by the same people who have no problem with Blackwater contractors raping little kids and murdering civilians.

169

Maltese have always been lap dogs, favoured by the nobility across time and cultures, but some historians say that Maltese were also once renowned for their rat-catching abilities! If the dog won’t hunt, like my Collie, she better hate fuckin’ strays, foxes, and coyotes, like my Collie. You’ve never seen a wild animal grovel, er, adopt such extreme postures of submission as a fox she’s barked at through nearly toothless jaws. Otherwise, it’s dog + burlap sack + bricks + pond. Of course, that requires the dog to be untrainable, but my late Field Spaniel, though we used to point to a scar on his scalp as where the aliens had sucked out his brain, still, through some strategic growls and bites, was taught to hunt by my more-late Cocker.

And it is why I continue to defend them, generally.

(a Wobbly tear is dragged to my eye) Yes, you are right. It’s like making fun of nuns, which I don’t allow out of anybody without a parochial education. They’re annoying, but they are doing God’s Work.

Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa!

170

(too late for the editing window) I know a fellow named Joe Hill. When introduced to him I mentioned that that I saw him last night, alive as you and me. He didn’t get it and probably thought I was coming on to him.

171

Ever read high school history books? “There was some trouble with labor, but then Mr. Carnegie gave everybody libraries, and then after that it was just greedy labor bosses and Communists.”

Sheeesh.

172

You are even older than I! My history books admitted Labor had a point, all the way through the Ludlow Massacre and beyond.

ETA: Er, not much of a point, but enough to try to keep us on the reservation.

173

Oh, hell, wasn’t that long ago, working temp in book warehouse, maybe twenty years. Checked out my son’s books, about ten years ago, and they were somewhat improved, but we live in The People’s Republic of Minnesota, whereas I was educated…I was schooled…mostly in Texas.

They forbade that new-fangled “onion in the belt” craze that was so big in Shelbyville…

174

It was local, but that was before the national media took over.

175

…which was the style at the time…

176

Silence, puppy! The Elders are maundering!

177

So tell me why. If you believe in the dreadful ACORN conspiracy, tell me what they hoped to gain by all this skullduggery. After all, conspiracy has a purpose, does it not? Willy Sutton robs a bank to get money. A cad conspires to besmirch maidens. What does ACORN get by creating false registrations? Who benefits?

We can dismiss any potential for political gain. This is obvious to anyone with the good sense that God gave a goose. Even if you could introduce fraudulent registrations, how do you turn those into votes? If you want to affect an election by ten thousand votes, you would need to enter that many fake registrations, and then get somebody to show up at the polls, maybe even with ID to match!

You enlist 10,000 co-conspirators, or 100 and drive like crazy from polling place to polling place? No. You get 5,000 co-conspirators, and they take the bus to a couple of them? OK, you got 5,000 potential blabber-mouths, or out and out rat finks. Not much of a plan.

And if the election goes to the other guy by 10,001, you’re just as boned, and have squandered all that money and time.

So what? What is to be gained by this conspiracy that ACORN is accused of? You load up the rolls with fake registrations just to annoy the shit out of some civil servants? Huh? If they never actually vote, for all practical purposes, they don’t exist.

If the plan is to undermine the Republican Party, and therefore destroy the moral fabric of Western Civ…well, the best way to do that is to do exactly what ACORN says it does: register the poor, the brown and the black. What is to be gained registering fake voters if that’s the goal? Why would you want to?

What’s left? Is there some black market in fake registrations, easy money to be made? No. Can’t sell them, can’t use them, can’t eat them.

Boiled down, there is simply no reason for ACORN to do what they are accused of, unless a mechanism can be found whereby fake votes can be made real.

Its a lie.

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Oh come on… Use what’s left of your imagination!

The most charitable explanation is simply that ACORN has decided that the most effective way to maximize registrations of poor voters is to look the other way while their workers do whatever they need to do to meet their quotas, then let the government sort it out. This would be similar to the reason why some companies look the other way while their salespeople bribe customers. Hey, a sale’s a sale, right?

179

STFU liar.

180

Well, as you can imagine, I cried myself to sleep for the past two nights over this.

It’s not so easy to forget trauma like that.