Some People Say

The Washington Post considers it a big news story that Republicans are criticizing SEIU for their ties to ACORN. The article says "some criticize," but here are the sum total of the critics in the story:

"Some Republicans", Republican Reps. Mark Steven Kirk and Peter Roskam of Illinois and Patrick T. McHenry of North Carolina, a guy named Herman Benson who appears to publicly hate SEIU for a living, and James "Buddy" Caldwell, the Democratic Attorney General of Louisiana, a state where the statewide Democrats are all Democrats in name only.

That seems like a broad cross-section of American opinion, worthy of the title "some".

Eric Boehlert traces this back to the media's touchiness with any criticism from the right that they are ignoring their issues. So they go completely in the other direction and dutifully type up guilt-by-association pieces like this, and they bury the truth about who is actually leading the crusade:

Today, with the GOP increasingly irrelevant and the right-wing media, and specifically Fox News, taking over as the Opposition Party, other journalists are now taking their cues in terms of partisan news from radio talk show hosts and cable TV hosts. It's unprecedented.

In today's "Some Criticize" era, all White House opponents have to do (regardless of who they are or what power they hold) is criticize Obama and the press corps snaps to attention and starts typing up the list of grievances. So today we have the Post furthering Fox News' attempted guilt-by-association with regards to ACORN and labor power SEIU, but the Post pretends it's really the GOP that's leading the charge:

"Last week, Republican Reps. Mark Steven Kirk and Peter Roskam of Illinois and Patrick T. McHenry of North Carolina urged the Census Bureau to stop allowing the SEIU to help recruit workers for its 2010 head count."

This utterly mundane partisan request suddenly qualifies as news in a Post article that's virtually barren of any actual revelations about ACORN or SEIU? Again, it's really Fox News and the GOP Noise Machine that are criticizing the "connections" between ACORN and SEIU, and it's the Post presenting that hodge-podge as news.

The article is really a ping-pong match of charges and random associations, like a written version of The Glenn Beck Show.

Meanwhile, Democrats in Congress, in a far more newsworthy story than what some Republicans are saying about whatever, have introduced a bill to hold defrauders of the government Treasury to the same standard to which the House held ACORN:

Top-ranking liberal lawmaker Rep. Betty McCollum (D-Minn.) pressed her colleagues to support a legislative counterpunch to the GOP’s effort to defund the controversial grass-roots organizing group ACORN.

McCollum, a senior Democratic Whip in her caucus, challenged the 172 Democrats who supported a measure to cut off federal funds for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) to endorse a similar measure geared towards private companies in business with the government.

The appropriations committee member introduced the “ACORN Act,” or “Against Corporations Organizing to Rip-off the Nation Act,” last week; it is the first formal defense against the recent GOP success in Congress to defund the left-leaning activist organization.

Democratic Reps. Raul Grijalva (Ariz.), David Obey (Wis.), Pete Stark (Calif.), Keith Ellison (Minn.), Lynn Woolsey (Calif.), Jim McDermott (Wash.) and Barbara Lee (Calif.) have co-sponsored the bill that would cut off federal agreements with private companies, nonprofits and other groups that have been convicted of defrauding the government.

If we had a media capable of dealing in an actual even-handed manner instead of the fake even-handedness they currently peddle, every Republican in the country would be asked if they support holding all corporations convicted of defrauding the government to the same standard.

Instead, we get "Some people say SEIU has cooties because it played in the same sandbox as ACORN."