Kathryn Lopez

May 22, 2013

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May 20, 2013

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May 13, 2013

Rabbi Nathan Lopes Cardozo: Why the giving of the document that would permanently change the world could only be done in desolation

David G. Savage: Church-state, literally? Supreme Court weighing public school graduation in a church

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May 10, 2013

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Caroline B. Glick: The dirty little secret about Israel's Arabs

Mona Charen: Hawking's Moral Calculus: The man and the movement he embraces

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May 8, 2013

Peter Ford: Why China is welcoming both Israel's Netanyahu and Palestinians' Abbas

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May 6, 2013

Edmund Sanders and Patrick J. McDonnell: Think Israel's objective in Syria is to weaken Assad or embolden the rebels? Think again

Brian Bennett: Israeli airstrikes may show weakness in Syrian defense

Michael Ollove: Millions of ex-felons, parolees and those on probation are about to be entitled to tax-payer paid health coverage

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The Kosher Gourmet by Susan M. Selasky: EGGPLANT WRAPS are an easy, sumptuous and scrumptious meal

May 3, 2013

Rabbi Nathan Lopes Cardozo: Human Courage and the Unavoidable, Disturbing Text

Steven Emerson: Attorney General Fights CAIR in Court, Lauds it in Public

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Harvard Health Letters: When to be screened for a hearing problem

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The Kosher Gourmet by Diane Rossen Worthington: A sweet surprise for Mother's Day dessert

May 1, 2013

Jonathan Rosenblum: An Improbable Journey to Orthodoxy

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April 29, 2013

Roy Gutman: Poland's new Jewish museum celebrates life, doesn't revisit Holocaust

Mark Clayton: Terrorism in America: Is US missing a chance to learn from failed plots?

Kim Murphy: Boston Bomber's 'Svengali' Revealed

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Harvard Health Letters: Tomatoes and stroke protection

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April 26, 2013

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Caroline B. Glick: Time to confront Obama

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April 24, 2013

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April 22, 2013

Ken Dilanian: Counterterrorism's future is unclear

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Jewish World Review Sept. 21, 2009 / 3 Tishrei 5770

ACORN scandal's deep roots

By Kathryn Lopez

http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, is a scandal. This story has become breaking news lately thanks to some recent guerilla journalism. But the problems of ACORN represent a broader, and even more scandalous idea: the conventional acceptance of the left's self-righteous claims to having a monopoly on all politics, policy and lifestyles that are good.

ACORN, if you haven't heard, is a radical organization that devotes itself with laser-like intensity to the maxim that all politics is local. The group supposedly exists to find affordable housing and provide social services for low-income families. But when two undercover, enterprising young people equipped with a hidden camera walked into an ACORN office, posing as an over-the-top pimp and prostitute wanting to establish a brothel dealing in enslaved children from other countries, ACORN employees offered the two advice: how to get on welfare; how to cheat the tax system; how to get housing from the government; and how to hide the criminal profit (a tin in your back yard, natch).

In the wake of the video, the Senate — with seven notable exceptions — voted to bar new federal funding for ACORN. But beyond the outrageous seven and the video, this is an opportunity for deeper revelations still.

Federally aided counsel to a pimp and prostitute and pervasive allegations of voter fraud aren't the worst of it. The reaction that has greeted the furor has been the most disturbing facet of the whole sorry affair. There is a place, a time and a need for getting to the bottom of the whys and hows of social pathologies. But that time is not while watching an organization that gets federal funding offer help with the sex trafficking of children on YouTube. And yet that was the default position of some on the left to this scandal.

ACORN's chief executive Bertha Lewis would eventually surrender to the demand for atonement, and issue a statement saying, "We have all been deeply disturbed by what we've seen in some of these videos. I must say, on behalf of ACORN's Board and our Advisory Council, that we will go to whatever lengths necessary to re-establish the public trust." But that was only after being on adamant defense.

And Lewis wasn't alone in self-protection mode. When the first video dropped, a blog on National Public Radio's Web site excused crimes as part and parcel of the plight of the community organizer: "It's also important to keep in mind that ACORN's workers are coming from the same low-income neighborhoods the organization serves, with all that entails — poor schools, high crime and the sorts of social problems that have been documented for decades." The post continued: "So the flaws conservatives are pointing out about ACORN are not so much problems associated with that organization per se but more about the problems of being poor and minority in urban America." Don't blame them, in other words. They can't help themselves, they're poor people.

And herein lies the deeper scandal — it's not just the denial of what is right in front of your face, it's denial of a bad mode of operating, of a sickness in policy and philosophy. For as much as the right is attacked for being dismissive of the poor and most vulnerable, the left clutches that which continues the plight of government dependence among so many.

ACORN is wedded to stale thinking that all too often makes people dependent, crushes responsibility, creativity and our very natures. And the Obama administration only plans to continue to increase welfare spending, ensuring that the system that gave birth to ACORN and its inexcusable conduct will continue to thrive.

That NPR item began with the announcement that the "'ACORN versus conservatives' contest of wills is beginning to look like some new version of the Cold War with either side claiming the other is evil and vowing to never give in until it prevails." There's something to that observation, actually. These tea parties, best sellers about liberty and tyranny and liberal fascism, they're about something: they're about ideas. Most of all, they're about preserving that which makes America exceptional.

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