Karl Rove behind ACORN fraud

As a child, Karl Rove was told the fable of “The boy who cried wolf.” When asked if he knew what the moral of the story was, young Karl replied, “Yes! Never tell the same lie twice.”

In keeping to that lesson, and knowing that no candidate he has supported could ever win on merit alone, Rove has practiced a life-long philosophy of deception, prevarication, distraction and newspeak. From planting bugs in his own office, to leaking false stories to make the national press look bad, to plain old voter suppression, Rove has run an ugly and effective campaign against the truth.

Fortunately, Rove’s own bad press has been catching up with him, such as in the scandal surrounding the firing of eight U. S. attorneys. David C. Iglesias of New Mexico lost his job in December 2005 after he declined to prosecute a voter-fraud case against ACORN, which had been registering large numbers of voters in the state's low-income and largely minority neighborhoods in 2004. Prominent New Mexico Republicans, including U.S. Senator Pete Domenici, had repeatedly complained to chief White House political strategist Karl Rove about Iglesias' failure to bring voter-fraud indictments. Once Iglesias said he couldn't prove a case against ACORN, his days were numbered.

ACORN became a target because of its successful voter-registration work. As the 2004 election approached, then-Attorney-General John Ashcroft launched a broad initiative to crack down on supposed voter fraud in battleground states, including Florida, Missouri, Ohio and New Mexico, where ACORN was making headway registering voters. In all of those states, Republicans filed suits against ACORN for voter fraud, and, in every case, ACORN was exonerated.

Seeing that that strategy has not been gaining enough of a foothold, Rove has unleashed a new campaign that would make a cowbird or cuckoo proud.

The Brown-headed Cowbird and the Cuckoo are well known for the practice of laying eggs in the nests of other species. The host mother is tricked into raising the chick as one of her own. Because the parasitic bird is usually larger and stronger, it takes most of the food the mother brings, starving out the other chicks.

In other words, since Rove could not beat ACORN with outside pressure, his lackeys have been planted inside ACORN. There, they have gone wild with multiple registrations, fake names, dead applicants, and simply paying homeless people to register. (By the way, homeless people can vote. Paying them to do so is illegal.)

The endgame in all of this is two-fold. First, Rove hopes to clog the system with so many bad registrations, that there will be a multitude of legitimate voters who will never make the final cut. And second, the issues being raised by Republicans regarding ACORN are being used as a smokescreen for what they are doing behind the scenes to suppress Democratic voter turnout. Using foreclosure lists to try to prevent people from voting; saying a person cannot vote without a government-approved photo identification; being kept from voting because you have an unpaid parking ticket, are behind on your child support, have a felony conviction or have filed for bankruptcy; illegally purging voters from the qualified voter list, and sending out absentee ballot applications to Democrats with the wrong return address.

These tactics are the lowest of the low, but it is right up Karl Rove’s alley. This might not be his last gasp, but the American voter can certainly make him crawl back into the slime-hole for much longer. We won in 2006, but not with as large of a margin if Rove and his attack dogs had not muddled up the works. This year we need to not just win, but win by such an overwhelming majority that these deviant behaviors will be purged from our national consciousness. We need to make them think twice before ever raising their ugly faces from the mud again.

As The Donald would say, “Rove, you’re fired!”