Damage is Done

Remember the pimp and whore undercover team who caught some ACORN workers giving some really stupid advice? Well an independent report by former Massachusetts Attorney General Scott Harshbarger concludes that neither the amateur sleuths nor ACORN did anything illegal.

However, Harshbarger found that the videos that sparked the scandal appear to have been substantially edited:

The videos that have been released appear to have been edited, in some cases substantially, including the insertion of a substitute voiceover for significant portions of Mr. O'Keefe's and Ms. Giles's comments, which makes it difficult to determine the questions to which ACORN employees are responding. A comparison of the publicly available transcripts to the released videos confirms that large portions of the original video have been omitted from the released versions.

I fully expect the wingnuts to discredit the report and disparage Harshbarger -- and what an easy target he is having been the prosecutor in a notorious satanic child abuse case in the 1980's. But the wingnuts have nothing to complain about. Congress has defunded ACORN. The Republicans got what they wanted. The damage is done.

Maybe it could have been avoided. Why, when Congress and the media were in a frenzy over these tapes, didn't anybody look closely at them? Everybody swallowed the BS about ACORN. Oddly, the lack of reasoning parallels those 80's satanic abuse cases. Nobody asked the obvious questions until after harsh judgments were made.