A tiny ACORN grows into a mighty molehill

I'll respond to Gail-T's comment here, then ask her to respond to the actual point I was making in the post on which she was commenting.

Gail says:

I think that this economic mess started because there wasn't enough of a system of checks and balances for the banks and lending institutions. Even King Obama was allegedly in on it when he worked as a "community organizer" and legal representative for ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now). Not only have seven of their workers admitted to registering 2,000 voters illegally, (I know. Obama didn't know) but he allegedly pressured banks into giving loans to people who didn't qualify. (He probably didn't know about that one, either, or was it that he called the banks in his sleep?)

Me, I had to deal with ACORN during my subprime mortgage lending days. There was a lot of easy credit going around, and ACORN was angrily insisting that we better not be precluding minorities and poor people from the easy cash stream. We found them to be a pain, especially because of their paranoia about discrimination. But we all would have laughed at the idea that ACORN had caused the housing crisis.

And McCain himself wasn't always an enemy of ACORN. He called them the people that make America great, when that seemed to suit his purposes. See here.

But help me out here: I thought conservatives were on the side of an unfettered free-market -- yet now they're decrying how Democrats refused to regulate the mortgage industry. Do you guys want a free market or not? I think Republicans are just grasping for a reason to blame the meltdown on Democrats, even if they have to act like Democrats to find one.

I think Stephen Colbert put it best, and most snarkily, when he commented on John McCain's concern that ACORN might "destroy the fabric of our democracy." Colbert said, roughly: Thank God that people are finally realizing that the threat to our democracy is some homeless people signing up Mickey Mouse as a voter, and that that the threat isn't coming from, oh, widespread wiretapping, an overeagerness to torture, or an excessive accumulation of executive power.

That goes to the heart of my earlier post, Gail-T. Bush/Cheney have accumulated excessive executive power, and now conservatives are freaked that it could be used against them. It shows they should have been more careful about building a process that they could live with when their opponents were in power.

But they should relax: The GOP has been the dominant federal power over the past 40 years, and they still haven't been able to ban abortions, teach creation, invade Iran, eliminate progressive taxes, cut entitlements, re-closet gays, or most anything they set out to do. So it's not as if Obama will suddenly implement Stalinism by 2012 (even if you can't get Focus on the Family to agree).

And, of course, if 2,000 guys named Mickey Mouse show up tomorrow and throw the election to Obama, I'll eat my words about ACORN being an overrated issue.