Double standard: Abu Graib and ACORN

Big news this week: conservatives have gone a long way toward their goal of destroying ACORN, the community-organizing, public services, non-profit organization. During the campaign, Republicans looked for every opportunity to discredit them, for example, by crying "scandal" in isolated incidents of paid workers in voter registration drives making up names to pad their credits. They accused the entire organization of "voter fraud" and tried to smear Obama, who had long-standing ties to the organization from his community organizing days. Let it be known that not one single "Mickey Mouse" bogus name tried to vote, because they weren't actual people -- just names listed to get another buck.

Of course, that was in fact voter registration fraud -- not voter fraud, as they tried to paint it. That is entirely different from when an actual person who is not eligible to vote tries to do so anyway. That's voter fraud. But the rare ACORN incidents were simply due to a few "bad apples" trying to make an extra buck in a system where they were paid according to how many people they registered.

Now the latest scandal involving ACORN is a tape of two ACORN workers advising a couple, posing as a prostitute and her pimp, about how to lie about her profession and launder her earnings so she could get housing aid. The purpose of the ACORN workers is to help people find low income housing. It was even more outrageous: the couple said they would be bringing in 13 yr old girls from Latin America to work as prostitutes, and the workers apparently kept on advising them. So all kinds of illegal acts were being discussed -- and all being secretly filmed by the sting operation.

Now we know that the whole thing was a set-up by conservative sources, secretly filmed, and gleefully leaked on the internet. The actors posing as the couple have a history of such politically motivated stings, as does the person who spread the video around.

Here's the problem. Of course this was wrong, and the two ACORN workers were promptly fired. They were bad apples doing what the organization never intended. Now Congress has gotten into the act and has voted to deny any federal funds to ACORN. IRS jumped in and canceled its program that provided tax preparation help to poor people. There will likely be outraged demands from other politically-sensitive public agencies that will be afraid to continue an association; and donors will stop giving money.

The conservatives will have won -- they will have destroyed ACORN. . . . Unless . . . ACORN has filed a multi-million dollar lawsuit claiming illegal secret audio taping and defamation by illegally distributing the video. My first thought when I heard about it: the whole thing was a set-up -- including the two ACORN "workers." So far, ACORN hasn't said that, but I would still want investigators to make sure no money passed between the actors and the workers.

Let's call it what it was: entrapment, deliberately planned to destroy ACORN.

But here's my point. The Abu Graib detainee abuse scandal was blamed on a few low-level "bad apples." Only one mid-level officer was disciplined; and those who planned and encouraged -- nay, ordered -- 'enhanced interrogation techniques 'and set the tone for 'ends justify means' mindset went scott free. In fact, I believe president bush gave some of them Medals of Freedom.

Now we have something similar: a few bad apples responded to a sting operation and got caught playing along. But instead of just getting rid of the bad apples, the whole humanitarian organization that has done so much good work will probably be destroyed.

Double standard. Here's the Republican standard:

our bad apples are just bad apples and the tree is fine;
your bad apples indicate a rotten tree and it must be cut down.

Ralph