NY-Sen: Gillibrand's ACORN vote vindicated

by: devtob

Thu Jan 28, 2010 at 08:55:44 AM EST

The faux uproar shamefully spread beyond the right-wing media, to the point that the House and the Senate passed a bill of attainder that denied ACORN access to any federal funding.

Only seven Senators voted against the ACORN bill -- one of them was Kirsten Gillibrand.

Now the "pimp," James O'Keefe, and three other young conservative activists have been arrested for "entering federal property under false pretenses with the intent of committing a felony."

Gillibrand's brave ACORN vote was once seen as a liability, even by some of her supporters.

Now, it is clearly less so.

Details, below.

She defended it by noting that ACORN does a lot of good work for working-class/poor people, and that the venial sins (no indictable crimes, yet) of less than a handful of low-level ACORN employees should not lead to ACORN being banned forever from federal contracts.

After all, it's not like ACORN murdered people, like some employees of federal contractor Blackwater did.

Here's how she defended her vote back then:

While Senator Gillibrand finds the actions of certain ACORN employees to be reprehensible and will ask ACORN leaders for a full investigation and plan to prevent any further abuse, the truth remains that thousands of New York families who are facing foreclosure depend on charitable organizations like ACORN for assistance.

Senator Gillibrand believes that eliminating funding for the important programs that ACORN provides would be harmful to the thousands of hard working New Yorkers who need extra assistance in the middle of this economic crisis.

ACORN did indeed fire the low-level employees who screwed up on O'Keefe's selectively edited videos, conduct an investigation of what really happened, and sue successfully for a preliminary injunction on the bill of attainder.

But, until yesterday, Gillibrand's ACORN vote would still have been a liability, given how the wingnut media meme about ACORN has been carelessly adopted by the rest of the corporate media.

The Republican candidate in the general (Bruce Blakeman, so far) would certainly have brought it up, and Harold Ford of Tennessee, Merrill Lynch, the DLC, NBC and the Park Avenue Regency probably also planned some Gillibrand/ACORN bashing.

But now that O'Keefe has been shown to be another Republican rat-fucking criminal, in New Orleans and also in the Baltimore ACORN office, Gillibrand's brave vote will presumably be less of an issue this year.

It would have been anyway for most New Yorkers, given the weakness and Breitbart-sponsorship of the O'Keefe videos.

O'Keefe's arrest, and rather obvious guilt for the felony federal crime charged, will take an arrow out of Blakeman's and Ford's quivers.

Howie Klein notes that Gillibrand was the only one of the seven Senators who faces the voters this year, in a post headlined "Kirsten Gillibrand stood up to the right wing scam artists who targeted ACORN and Landrieu".

For most of us, O'Keefe's arrest is schadenfreude, and also a bit of karma.

For Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, it is vindication for a brave vote against the right-wing propaganda machine and the rat-fucking attack they launched against ACORN.

And for the Constitution, which forbids bills of attainder.

The Constitution-loving teabaggers might support her for that, were they not mostly Republican sock puppets who believe all the wingnut ACORN fantasies.