Where's the Obama Anger?

Let me see if I've got this right: a presidential candidate is paying a sinister far-left partially publicly financed crowd which is padding the voting rolls and in effect nullifying my vote and yours, and if the polls are right, is on the verge of becoming president of the United States.

Are we nuts? What can an allegedly sizeable number of Americans be thinking when they plan to go into the voting booths and cast a vote for a candidate who is openly paying almost $1 million to a seedy outfit like ACORN which on the record is registering, often multiple times, new voters who could be relied on to vote for him on November?

According to The Wall Street Journal:

In September, the secretary of state of Michigan said that ACORN had submitted "a sizeable number of duplicate and fraudulent applications." In early October, Nevada's Secretary of State Ross Miller, a Democrat, requested a raid on ACORN's offices, following complaints of false names and fictional addresses (including the starting lineup of the Dallas Cowboys). In Nevada, Larry Lomax, Clark County registrar of voters revealed he found rampant fraud in 2,000 to 3,000 applications ACORN submitted weekly.

In Ohio officials are investigating voter fraud connected with ACORN, and election officials in Florida's Seminole County are withholding ACORN registrations they say appear to be fraudulent. New Mexico, North Carolina, and Missouri are also checking into hundreds of dubious ACORN registrations and in Wisconsin officials are investigating ACORN employees for, according to one election official, "making people up or registering people that were still in prison."

In Lake County, Ind., which has already found more than 2,100 bogus applications among the 5,000 that were dumped right before the deadline. "All the signatures looked exactly the same," Ruthann Hoagland, of the county election board told the Journal. Bridgeport, Conn., estimates about 20 percent of registrations were faulty. As of July, the city of Houston had rejected or put on hold about 40 percent of the 27,000 registration cards submitted.

Faced with such discomforting facts, Obama and his campaign rely on outright falsehoods to fend off the blame for his association with ACORN, claiming that Obama has only the most tenuous connections with the group, never participated in training sessions and only represented ACORN in one law suit.

The facts reveal the falsity of their claims.

According to an article in the journal Social Policy entitled, “Case Study: Chicago — The Barack Obama Campaign,” by Toni Foulkes, a Chicago ACORN leader and a member of ACORN’s National Association Board Obama has a long and close association with ACORN.

In contrast to most accounts in the pro-Obama media Obama just happened to represent Acorn in the so-called “motor voter” case, Foulkes insists that ACORN specifically chose Obama in the motor voter case based on his past work in his role organizing “Project VOTE” in 1992. He writes that this project was in direct partnership with ACORN and stresses Obama’s yearly service as a key figure in ACORN’s leadership-training seminars.

Foulkes also reports that Obama’s long service with ACORN led many members to serve as the volunteer shock troops of Obama’s early political campaigns such as his 1996 state Senate campaign, and his failed bid for Congress in 2000. With Obama having personally helped train a new cadre of Chicago ACORN leaders, by the time of Obama’s 2004 U.S. Senate campaign, Obama and ACORN were “old friends,” says Foulkes.

Just what is ACORN? According to an article in a 2003 City Journal article by Sol Stern "Acorn's Nutty Regime for Cities" ACORN is "the key modern successor of the radical 1960s 'New Left,' with a “1960s-bred agenda of anti-capitalism” to match. ACORN, says Stern, grew out of 'one of the New Left’s silliest and most destructive groups, the National Welfare Rights Organization.' In the 1960’s, NWRO launched a campaign of sit-ins and disruptions at welfare offices. The goal was to remove eligibility restrictions, and thus effectively flood welfare rolls with so many clients that the system would burst.

The theory, explains Stern, was that an impossibly overburdened welfare system would force “a radical reconstruction of America’s unjust capitalist economy.” Instead of a socialist utopia, however, we got the culture of dependency and family breakdown that ate away at America’s inner cities — until welfare reform began to turn the tide."

On the face of it, voters have to turn a blind eye to Obama's hand-in-hand relationship with this crowd that is making a sick joke of our election system. Those voters must also ignore such inconvenient facts as the role Obama and his party played in bringing down our economy — conveniently in the middle of an election campaign — and his advocacy of what amounts to infanticide.

The current economic debacle was caused by the collapse of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac a pair of quasi-federal agencies that were gravy trains for Obama and his Democratic pals in Congress. Both outfits were being loaded down with what are now known as toxic mortgage loans banks were forced to make as as result of Clinton administration ruling and direct on-the-spot pressure from ACORN. Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chris Dodd and House Banking Committee Chairman Barney Frank topped the list of Democrats riding the Fannies' gravy train. Both successfully fought tooth and nail against GOP attempts including those by Sen. McCain to rein in the two outfits.

"Americans need to see Obama's record on human life," said Gov. Sarah Palin at a rally in Pennsylvania. "I listened when he defended his unconditional support for unlimited abortions. He said that a woman shouldn’t have to be — quote — 'punished with a baby.' He said that right here in Johnstown — 'punished with a baby' . . . Obama has voted against bills to end partial-birth abortion, citing his record in the Illinois Senate, when a bipartisan majority passed legislation against the practice. Senator Obama opposed that bill. He voted against it in committee, and voted 'present' on the Senate floor. Recalling that the late Democratic Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan described partial-birth abortion as “too close to infanticide.”

Obama, she added, "is a politician who has long since left behind even the middle ground on the issue of life. He has sided with those who won’t even protect a child born alive. And this exposes the emptiness of his promises to move beyond the 'old politics.'" Voting for Obama, she said, “is a vote for activist courts that will continue to smother the open and democratic debate we need on this issue, at both the state and federal level,” she added, "A vote for Barack Obama would give the ultimate power over the issue of life to a politician who has never once done anything to protect the unborn.”

Is this the kind of man Americans want to govern them? If so they'll get exactly the change they deserve. And it won't be hope.

Phil Brennan is a veteran journalist and World War II Marine who writes for Newsmax.com. He is editor and publisher of Wednesday on the Web (www.pvbr.com) and was Washington columnist (Cato) for National Review magazine in the 1960s.

He also served as a staff aide for the House Republican Policy Committee and helped handle the Washington public relations operation for the Alaska Statehood Committee which won statehood for Alaska. He is also a trustee of the Lincoln Heritage Institute and a member of the Association For Intelligence Officers.

He can be reached at pvb@pvbr.com.