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ACORN’s White Horse
Obama to the rescue.

By Andrew C. McCarthy

This is rich.

Sen. Barack Obama’s campaign is complaining to the Justice Department about the attention being focused on the determined effort by ACORN, Obama’s wholly owned vote-fraud division, to steal the 2008 election. Adding ignorance to gall, the campaign demands that what it calls a “Special Prosecutor” must investigate not ACORN but — you guessed it — the McCain campaign and the Bush administration.

The art form to which chutzpah has been raised in this instance is a letter from the Obama campaign’s top lawyer, Robert Bauer of the Perkins Coie law firm in Washington. Of course these days, due to the intricate web of traps for the unwary known as “campaign finance regulations” — for which Sen. McCain has no one but himself to blame — all candidates for high office need legal teams. Obama, though, is a special case.







  

Steyn: The Superbower

Blase: A Medicaid Buy-Off

Sanders: Blanche Lincoln’s Balancing Act

Costa: Saturday Night Fever

Miller: The Man Who Would Kill Lincoln

Hibbs: Just Bite Her Already

Goldberg: We Need Your Help

Spruiell: Welcome to the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy

Editors: End It, Don’t Amend It

Goldberg: Palinophobes Hate First, Ask Questions Later

Murdock: Medicare: A Glimpse of the Future?

Krauthammer: Travesty in New York

Charen: Holder’s True Motive

Lowry: Barack Obama’s Chump Diplomacy

Spakovsky: Criminalizing Health-Care Freedom

Anderson: Roadmap to Victory




When not scorching the earth to destroy ordinary citizens who have the temerity to ask the messiah blunt questions, or threatening political opponents with prosecution for campaigning against him, or promising war crimes investigations against the opposition party if Americans are daft enough to put his toadies in charge of the Justice Department, Obama comrades can be found editing the amendments to the last modification of their most recently restated campaign-finance reporting errors.

One day the candidate is taking money hand over fist from fictitious supporters like “Good Will” and “Doodad Pro.” The next day, he is illegally raising funds from foreigners (perhaps more than a staggering $63 million), including from Palestinians — who figure a candidate who pours tens of thousands of dollars into the coffers of a terror-supporting former PLO spokesman like Rashid Khalidi is a safe bet to make a prophet out of Jesse Jackson. On still other days, Obama finds himself having to explain his campaign’s misrepresentation of the $800,000 payday it gave his old pals at ACORN.

ACORN, the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now, is essentially a Marxist shakedown outfit. One of its main rackets is election fraud — but it can also be very helpful if you happen to be a Leftist activist who finds himself needing, say, to foment a riot, vandalize public property, shut down legislative hearings or opposition conferences, harass the families of elected officials, extort leave-us-alone pay-offs from banks, promote illegal immigration, or the like.

Like ACORN, Obama is a community organizer in the Saul Alinsky radical mode, and he goes way back — two decades back — with the organization. He represented ACORN as a lawyer, taught “organizing” to ACORN’s up and coming rabble-rousers, colluded with ACORN in Chicago “get out the vote” projects, funded ACORN when he sat on the boards of left-wing charities, and exploited ACORN’s enthusiastic support when he won his senate seat in 2004 — a victory the “non-partisan” ACORN can’t help itself but claim credit for.

THE SPECIAL-PROSECUTOR CANARD

And now, as the heat has been turned up on ACORN for tossing what little caution it has ever had to the wind as it goes into overdrive on Obama’s behalf, The One himself is riding to the rescue. In an Orwellian brush-back pitch, the Obama campaign demands that DOJ investigate the McCain campaign and Bush Justice Department officials for what it portrays as the trumpeting of “unsupported, spurious allegations of vote fraud.”

Before we get to that last farcical assertion (by the guy who wants to be responsible for enforcing federal law, no less), Obama ought to be embarrassed by the sheer stupidity the letter conveys.

Bauer addresses his complaints to both Attorney General Michael Mukasey and Connecticut U.S. Attorney Nora Dannehy. Why Dannehy? Because, according to Bauer, she is the “Special Prosecutor” appointed by Mukasey to investigate whether crimes were committed in connection with President Bush’s firing of nine U.S. attorneys. “The appointment of a Special Prosecutor was necessary,” Obama’s legal beagle opines, “because the Department’s leadership was the focus of the investigation and unable to credibly undertake an independent, professional and credible inquiry.”

Wrong. Glenn Fine, the DOJ inspector-general appointed by President Clinton and retained by President Bush (since keeping George Tenet on at CIA was apparently not enough), issued a Democrat-pleasing report calling for an investigation of the already mega-investigated U.S. attorney firings — notwithstanding that the president’s termination of executive branch appointees is not a crime. Mukasey responded by selecting Dannehy to lead the probe. But Dannehy is not a “Special Prosecutor.”


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