He now says he is no longer planning to investigate ACORN, which is under fire for vote-fraud accusations in last year’s presidential election. But why the change of heart? Conyers, faithfully adhering to the blame-casting game that has long held sway in Congress, weakly and obtusely laid the fault for this recent reversal at the feet of purposely unidentified “powers that be.”
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“The powers that be decided against it,” Conyers told the Washington Times last week.
But what powers, specifically? Who’s wields enough clout to get the powerful committee chairman, who’s been in Congress for over 40 years, to reverse himself? Conyers would not say. “The chairman declined to elaborate, shrugging off questions about who told him how to run his committee and give the Democrat-allied group a pass,” the Washington Times reported.
A prime suspect as to who whispered the right words in the ear of Congressman Conyers is the person at the pinnacle of power, President Barack Obama himself. This theory is credible given that President Obama was an employee and an employer (paying ACORN and its sister organization $800,000 to register voters during the last campaign) of ACORN.
But the fingerprints on the axe that felled the ACORN probe may actually be those of Conyers himself. As a matter of fact, in 2006 ACORN gave Conyers a 100-percent rating in its annual legislative scorecard. Conyers acknowledged this accolade and demonstrated his gratitude for the high marks by referring to the mammoth umbrella conglomerate as a “long-standing and well-regarded organization that fights for the poor and working class.” Moreover, while speaking at ACORN’s national convention in June 2008, Conyers played butcher, throwing red meat to the assembled leftists by declaring American corporations to be “capitalist predators.”
Despite the mutual adulation, applause, and Conyers’ on-again, off-again interest in investigating ACORN, the group is a nut that needs to be cracked. The catalog of ACORN crimes (proved and alleged), conspiracies, and credibility crises is voluminous to the point of head-shaking astonishment. For starters, ACORN and its affiliated associations are millions of dollars in arrears on taxes. Next, Dale Radke, the brother of ACORN founder Wade Radke, is swimming neck deep in an eight-year obfuscation of his purported pilfering of a million dollars in ACORN funds. In May, the attorney general of Nevada filed 39 felony counts of voter-registration fraud against various iterations of the ACORN behemoth, and within a week, the assistant district attorney of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, brought similar charges against several of ACORN’s crooked canvassers. Later, not to be outshined by its eastern neighbor, Cuyahoga County, Ohio, initiated an investigation of ACORN after uncovering duplicate voter registrations and the subsequent casting of fraudulent votes.
With all of this smoke, it is remarkable that Congressman Conyers has dismissed the fire brigade, especially given that he was the very one who was earlier sounding the alarm. Curious, too, is Conyers’ polar re-positioning given his own previous assessment that the group’s behavior merits probing and that the heft of the expanding dossier of incriminating evidence against it constituted a “pretty serious matter.” Suddenly, though not altogether inexplicably, it seems that with regard to ACORN and its highly questionable, and likely criminal, conduct, Congressman Conyers just doesn’t mind and the conspicuous conflagration of controversy surrounding it just doesn’t matter.
Photo: AP Images
