Friendly reminder from ACORN chief Bertha Lewis: You’re racist

Unless you’re cool with, say, covering up the embezzlement of $5 million. Then you’re okay.

Saith the woman heralded by RNC chair Michael Steele as doing a “phenomenal job” in handling the scandal:

“For many years, there’ve been folks who’ve disagreed with our ideology or methodology that [have] gone after us,” Mrs. Lewis, ACORN’s chief executive officer, said in a speech at the National Press Club in Washington.

“I mean we, [going back] to 2004, we now see through e-mails from Karl Rove from the previous administration that ACORN itself was targeted, targeted to go after us so that we would stop doing voter registration because it was said that we were moving too many minorities to vote, changing the power dynamics on the local election and that we needed to be stopped.”

She also labeled as racist the infamous videos that show ACORN workers advising a man and young woman posing as pimp and prostitute how to circumvent the law. “These new filmmakers, [James] O’Keefe himself, told The Washington Post, ‘They’re registering too many minorities; they usually vote Democratic; somebody’s got to stop them,’” Mrs. Lewis said.

That’s not the first time she’s smeared O’Keefe as a racist, but in this case she’s only repeating the lie WaPo told her. Remember this from last month, when WaPo dropped the following on its readers?

Though O’Keefe described himself as a progressive radical, not a conservative, he said he targeted ACORN for the same reasons that the political right does: its massive voter registration drives that turn out poor African Americans and Latinos against Republicans.

“Politicians are getting elected single-handedly due to this organization,” he said. “No one was holding this organization accountable. No one in the media is putting pressure on them. We wanted to do a stunt and see what we could find.”

Only days later, after righty bloggers had had a well-justified conniption over it, did the following correction appear:

This article about the community organizing group ACORN incorrectly said that a conservative journalist targeted the organization for hidden-camera videos partly because its voter-registration drives bring Latinos and African Americans to the polls. Although ACORN registers people mostly from those groups, the maker of the videos, James E. O’Keefe, did not specifically mention them.

Don’t think of the original piece as a smear; think of it as WaPo “helping” its readers see O’Keefe for the racist he surely must be. As for Lewis, the more phony, politically calculated charges of prejudice fly from the mouths of discredited leftist apparatchiks, the more devalued the currency is. Keep it up. With any luck, Polanski will start accusing his critics of being anti-Polish or something.

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