Comment: With the Bush administration having destroyed the economy, along with just about everything else, the GOP right has been beating the rhetorical war drums about ACORN. Between the lines, they are implying that the collapse of the housing market and, thus, the financial industry was produced by poor blacks and Llatinos buying homes they couldn’t afford. (Of course, it WASN’T produced by Goldman Sachs, Pimco [stay tuned for upcoming programs], Roland Arnall and the other architects of the subprime mess.)
As it happens, scapegoating ACORN–and by extension non-white minorities and their “liberal enablers”–had much of its genesis with Karl Rove’s role in firing U.S. attorney David Iglesias of New Mexico. It seems that Iglesias resisted GOP pressure to crack down on ACORN, which was registering voters.
Much of the right-wing rhetorical firestorm about ACORN derived from activist James O’Keefe’s “sting,” in which he posed as a pimp, seeking housing for “ho’s.”
James O’Keefe turns out to be a fellow-traveler of the white supremacist movement.
“Rove: a Moving Target” by Michael Issikoff;Newsweek; 2007.
New disclosures in the U.S. attorney controversy have increased the pressure on White House aide Karl Rove. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’s ex-chief of staff, D. Kyle Sampson, testified last week that “during the run-up to the midterm elections,” the A.G. told him Rove had “complained” that David Iglesias, the U.S. attorney in New Mexico, and two other federal prosecutors, were not doing enough to prosecute voter fraud—a top GOP priority. It was shortly after that, Sampson said, that Iglesias got added to the list of U.S. attorneys to be fired. (Iglesias told NEWSWEEK he had been repeatedly pushed by New Mexico GOP officials to prosecute workers for ACORN, an activist group that was registering voters in minority neighborhoods, but he found no cases worth bringing.) Justice was also forced to correct its earlier assertion that Rove did not play “any role” in replacing the U.S. attorney in Little Rock. Sampson’s e-mails showed he had described the replacement as “important to ... Karl.”
Senate Judiciary Committee chair Sen. Patrick Leahy warned the White House that even a Gonzales resignation would not “short-circuit” his probe, vowing to block confirmation hearings for any successor unless he gets Rove under oath. (Bush has refused to allow Rove and other White House officials to testify in public.) White House spokeswoman Dana Perino reaffirmed Bush’s “100 percent” backing of Gonzales, and the A.G. vowed to carry on.
The inquiries are only multiplying. The Office of Special Counsel has begun its own investigation into whether Iglesias’s dismissal was a violation of both the Hatch Act (which prohibits federal employees from being fired for “political” reasons) and a law that bars discrimination against military-service members, said an official, anonymous when talking about an internal matter. Justice officials have at times suggested one reason Iglesias was fired is that he spent too much time away from the office because he is in the naval reserves. The agency’s director, Scott Bloch, recently pledged “aggressive” enforcement of the law, which is increasingly important given the growing number of National Guard and military reserves called up for service in Iraq. . . .
“James O’Keefe’s Race Problem” by Max Blumenthal; Salon.com; 2/3/2010.
Many of the conservatives who gleefully promoted James O’Keefe’s past political stunts are feigning shock at his arrest on charges that he and three associates planned to tamper with Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu’s phone lines. Once upon a time, right-wing pundits hailed the 25-year-old O’Keefe as a creative genius and model of journalistic ethics. Andrew Breitbart, who has paid O’Keefe, called him one of the all-time “great journalists” and said he deserved a Pulitzer for his undercover ACORN video. Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly declared he should have earned a “congressional medal.”
His right-wing admirers don’t seem to mind that O’Keefe’s short but storied career has been defined by a series of political stunts shot through with racial resentment. Now an activist organization that monitors hate groups has produced a photo of O’Keefe at a 2006 conference on “Race and Conservatism” that featured leading white nationalists. The photo, first published Jan. 30 on the Web site of the anti-racism group One People’s Project, shows O’Keefe at the gathering, which was so controversial even the ultra-right Leadership Institute, which employed O’Keefe at the time, withdrew its backing. O’Keefe’s fellow young conservative provocateur Marcus Epstein organized the event, which gave anti-Semites, professional racists and proponents of Aryanism an opportunity to share their grievances and plans to make inroads in the GOP. . .
One People’s Project covered the event at the time, sending a freelance photographer to document the gathering. Project director Daryle Jenkins told O’Keefe manned a literature table filled with tracts from the white supremacist right, including two pseudo-academic publications that have called blacks and Latinos genetically inferior to whites: American Renaissance and the Occidental Quarterly. The leading speaker was Jared Taylor, founder of the white nationalist group American Renaissance. “We can say for certain that James O’Keefe was at the 2006 meeting with Jared Taylor. He has absolutely no way of denying that,” Jenkins said. O’Keefe’s attorney did not respond to a request for comment on his client’s role in the conference.
Martin Borman, Nazi in Exile
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