Did ACORN chief organizer Bertha Lewis say anything that was true in her recent speech at the National Press Club?
The embattled ACORN CEO deserved an Academy Award nomination for her virtuoso performance in which she not only depicted ACORN as an innocent victim but also as a whistleblower that tried to nip the subprime mortgage crisis in the bud.
She blamed everyone but herself: “We’ve seen this play before, whether it was the civil rights movement or whatever, when you organize poor people to have real power, what you do is often turned against you.”
She blamed Republicans: “The RNC…because we’ve been inflated as the boogeyman, raises almost $2 million a day, every day, and this form of modern-day ACORN McCarthyism has got to stop.”
Lewis’s statement about the Republican National Committee was immediately torpedoed by RNC chairman Michael Steele who defended ACORN.
In a video of Steele from a Sept. 21 speech that surfaced on a left-wing website the day of Lewis’s speech, Steele praised Lewis. “The current head of the organization, she’s done a phenomenal job getting out in front of it,” Steele said. “I applaud her. I take her at her word that she wants to work to make sure that the bad apples are thrown out.”
Steele said he respects ACORN’s history of “working in the community and helping the poor.”
So much for the Republican boogeyman.
Lewis said little about her own role in covering up the nearly $1 million embezzlement perpetrated by founder Wade Rathke’s brother. After news of the theft broke, Lewis forced out honest ACORN national board members who dared to demand accountability.
Lewis, who has high-level contacts within the Marxist governments of Venezuela and Bolivia, also glossed over her ties to the radical Working Families Party in New York state and to President Obama’s political director Patrick Gaspard.
I spotted eight major lies in the Lewis speech.
Here are just two of them:
LIE #1: Lewis claimed no one voted fraudulently in 2008 presidential election “because of an ACORN registration.” She added, “This voter fraud or the allegations of voter fraud was to have hung a shadow over the presidential election. And it proved to be an utter fabrication and a work of fiction that was created by the people who wrote it.”
In fact, vote fraud happened in Ohio in 2008 and ACORN was smack dab in the middle of it.
Darnell Nash of Cleveland, Ohio, was registered to vote by ACORN nine times for last year’s election. Nash cast a fraudulent ballot and was convicted of vote fraud and voter registration fraud. He’s currently serving a six-month prison term.
A spokesman for Cleveland’s Democratic prosecutor Bill Mason told me earlier this month that a local investigation of ACORN remains wide open.
The conviction of Nash, a cross-dressing prostitute known by several aliases, is hugely significant for several reasons, not least of which is the fact that ACORN has long maintained that vote fraud, as opposed to the lesser crime of voter registration fraud, essentially never happens.
LIE #7: Following an anti-Karl Rove rant, Lewis deliberately smeared undercover sting video filmmaker James O’Keefe. O’Keefe and Hannah Giles posed as a pimp and prostitute in the videos seeking help from ACORN. ACORN workers across the nation are shown in the videos counseling the pair on how to evade taxes, make fraudulent applications for government aid, and disguise a planned brothel.
Lewis said O’Keefe told the Washington Post, “They’re registering too many minorities that usually vote Democratic. Somebody’s got to stop them.”
In fact after the newspaper ran the Sept. 18 cover story to which Lewis refers, the newspaper ran a correction because O’Keefe said no such thing.
Does anyone believe the CEO of ACORN wouldn’t have known this?
It was an obvious smear and Lewis knows it.
For the full article, go to American Spectator.
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