A Second Look | Congress Targets Acorn, Then Overshoots, While Ignoring Worse Behavior

via Whoops: Anti-ACORN Bill Ropes In Defense Contractors, Others Charged With Fraud

Going after ACORN may be like shooting fish in a barrel lately — but jumpy lawmakers used a bazooka to do it last week and may have blown up some of their longtime allies in the process.

The congressional legislation intended to defund ACORN, passed with broad bipartisan support, is written so broadly that it applies to “any organization” that has been charged with breaking federal or state election laws, lobbying disclosure laws, campaign finance laws or filing fraudulent paperwork with any federal or state agency. It also applies to any of the employees, contractors or other folks affiliated with a group charged with any of those things.

In other words, the bill could plausibly defund the entire military-industrial complex. Whoops.

This “ broad brushing” of the wording of the law oftentimes makes Congress look foolish but not in this case. This time they unwittingly did the right thing. All those employees and contractors need to be regulated. And sometimes I think that the military-industrial complex could use some defunding.

There are other, however, much more egregious examples of waste, fraud, and abuse than a handful of employees giving advice to a pimp that led to the firing of the ACORN employees . Several defense contractors have been in the news lately.

The defense contractor hired to guard the State Department facility in Kabul, Afghanistan, was exposed recently committing sexual deviancy not seen since the days of Caligula. They claim that the photos were of some kind of “hazing”:

According to POGO, [Project on Government Oversight] employees of Armor Group North America—a unit of contracting giant Wackenhut—get their jollies off by “deviant hazing [that] has created a climate of fear and coercion, with those who declined to participate often ridiculed, humiliated, demoted, or even fired.”

POGO wrote a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton detailing the Lord of the Flies atmosphere surrounding the contractor guarding the embassy. The hazing behavior included eating potato chips from one another’s butt cheeks, drinking beverages from the butt cheeks, and pissing on one another.

The point here is that the legislation directed to hammer one organization may have been written so broadly as to include all contractors, referencing the linked article above. If that is the case then Armor Group should be defunded right along with ACORN. Right?

And what about the defense contractor DynCorp? The were busted running a prostitution ring in Bosnia. This next blockquote is from a Jason Linkus article titled, The Unintended Consequences Of The “Defund ACORN” Act, today in Huffington Post. Got there and read it. There are more examples of Congress’ inaction:

And while we’re on the subject of ACORN, which had a handful of employees busted for offering assistance to a fake pimp and his fake prostitution business, let’s consider the case of taxpayer-funded contractor DynCorp — its employees actually, LITERALLY, did service a prostitution ring in Bosnia in August of 2002. Girls between the ages of 12 and 15 were involved. And then six years later, employees of the very same contractor went to Iraq and DID IT AGAIN! And this time somebody got killed.

That’s one government contractor, two war zones, two continents, two prostitution rings, one known death, zero consequences. What has your member of Congress done about it? SOD ALL, that’s what! And DynCorp is still “supporting US interests worldwide.”

Zero consequences! You would think that the Republicans in Congress would be screaming, what with all those “values” they claim! Yet, let a community organization that helps hundreds of thousands of our nation’s poor get jobs and find housing have a handful of employees make procedural mistakes and Congress goes off the deep end – Democrats included.

What has happened to our sense of fairness in America? What has become of our historically acute sense of right from wrong? It has been buried by an ideological fight for the hearts and minds of the voters, by a war on our sensibilities that is meant to confuse us. People can walk the street now toting guns and waving signs that portray our president as a Nazi, signaling to all our younger folks that this is the new “right thing to do” when just a few years ago these whack-jobs would have been swept away by the police. Fairness and politeness no longer exists in the US. The notion of “what’s right is right” has been twisted to the point of confrontation and threats of violence. The things that have made America great in the past, like equal justice for all, is now drowned by something else – talk and spin.