ACORN’s About Face
September 17, 2009
Last week, when confronted with video evidence of ACORN employees advising people how to avoid federal taxes in setting up a brothel and “cloak the status of underage ’sex workers,’” a defiant Bertha Lewis, ACORN’s executive director, called the vile footage part of a right-wing conspiracy to “destroy the largest community organization of black, Latino, poor and working-class people in the country.”
Now that it’s abundantly clear this ham-handed attempt to play the race card has backfired, ACORN is furiously backpedaling. Lewis now pronounces herself “deeply disturbed by what I’ve seen in some of these videos” and pledges to go to “whatever lengths necessary to reestablish the public trust.” One immediate step: “retraining of [ACORN's] front-line staff in its nationwide offices within 48 hours” - presumably to inform them that running houses of prostitution and employing underage “sex workers” is against the law … or at least not worthy of federally-funded advice.
These desperate efforts by Lewis to salvage what’s left (if anything) of ACORN’s public credibility are really just a side-show. The real question is when President Obama is going to show some measure of leadership and public decency by committing his administration to de-funding this disgraceful organization.