I did a quick hit on this yesterday, but this is too important to let scroll away so quickly. There's a new video out from Brave New Films and ACORN that directly exposes the truth about ACORN--that it scares the right wing, because their power depends on people not voting. Yup, they have footage here of Paul Weyrich saying precisely that. There's also a brief clip of Andrew Sullivan talking about the delegitimation-of-an-Obama-presidency angle. So, it sets the political context, and then it goes into the facts. It is, in short, the perfect way to bring someone up to speed--fast:
From my perspective, the election is in the bag. What we're fighting for now is not to win the election, but to win the power to govern--and winning the election is just one part of that.
Anyone who remembers the Clinton years knows what this means. The Republicans never accepted Clinton as President, and the Democrats failed to crush the Republicans for this outright disloyalty to the democratic process. The media, in turn,normalized this state of affairs. Unlike any other President, Clinton had no "honeymoon" period, and was subjected to a continual witch-hunt designed to cripple him and drive him from office. They came very close to acheiving their ultimate goal, and were quite effective at keeping him hamstrung. One consequence of this may well have been 9/11, as their demonic politicization of everything under the sun impeded the full-scale focus on combatting terrorism generally and al Qaeda in particular. And, of course, the impeachment of Clinton significantly damaged Gore's chances of winning the presidency in 2000, hardening the media's hostility against him for failing to join in their witch-hunt.
So this is what we're fighting against now: the pre-emptive undermining of everything we're fighting for in this election.
Here's ACORN's press release:
October 21, 2008-ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) released a video today, produced by Brave New Films. This video calls attention to both the concocted Republican issues of voter fraud and the Republican coordinated attempts at voter suppression.
This video, which will be widely distributed via the web, is part of an ongoing campaign by ACORN to set the record straight. The United States has the lowest rate of voter participation of any western nation. Over the last 18 months, ACORN has waged a voter registration campaign, which successfully helped enfranchise 1.3 million new voters. Recently the McCain-Palin campaign, the Republican party and some sensationalist members of the media, have been on a weeks-long campaign to discredit ACORN over bogus allegations of "voter fraud." This video examines both the skewed media attention and the real story of ACORN's voter registration program. It also aggressively calls attention to the ongoing campaign of suppression, which affects far more voters than anything recently covered by the mainstream media.
ACORN is holding screening house parties in 17 cities around the country, including: Washington, DC, Boston, Springfield, MA, Los Angeles, Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, Hartford, Orlando, Houston, Dallas, Bridgeport, Detroit, Flint, Twin Cities and Charlotte.
In a comment to the original quick hit, DaveW said:
Our side is so much better now
at dealing with GOP lies. This video sets the record straight about McCain's deceptions without being defensive or apologetic and uses the fraudulent controversy to bite back at the wingnut liars. Nice Work.
Spreading this video around might just be the most important remaining thing we can do before election day. As well as joining up with, and supporting, Acorn.
