Dry Rot

Shannon Love brings the lessons of a career in tech support to the very entertaining ACORN scandal: Three Times Is Slavery & Treason

Back when I did computer tech support, we had a rule of thumb for evaluating the significance of reports of unusual and previously unreported failures .

• One report of a failure is a fluke.
• Two reports of a failure is a coincidence. It might just be two users making the same error.
• Three reports indicates a pattern of failure that arises from the hardware or software itself.

This rule of thumb evolved after observing the failures of millions of computers. We learned that three separate computers would only suffer the same failure if the failure arose from a common source in the computers themselves. Just three machines out of millions told us we most likely had a systemic problem.

This brings me to the Acorn child prostitution scandal.

Indeed, it does. Love's conclusion is that 3 independent incidents of child slavery facilitation suggests that ACORN's willingness to aid and abet crime is an overriding goal, rather than an aberration. This is without mentioning the many voter fraud prosecutions of ACORN workers in jurisdictions across the country. Or, mentioning the $1 million embezzlement by ACORN founder Wade Rathke's brother, which was actively covered up by the board of directors. Who knows what goes on behind the scenes there? Maybe they sit around chortling over how they are taking down The Man. More likely, they are simply a (very) low-rent version of the TARP bailouts; people gaming the system to extract $$ from a government with too much time and money on its hands.

Either way, dodges like the "pimp & pro" scam are almost inevitable. It's like watching Ted Kennedy's fine words about "helping the drowntrodden" turn literally to s*** after traveling through the bowels of Big Government, from the Senate Floor through HUD, HHS, FHA etc. and finally to dingey offices in Baltimore and DC. Love wonders how respectable progressives can abide with this sort of sleaze that has been enabled by their years of advocacy, white papers, marches and petitions:

But this is what I really don’t understand:

This systemic criminality is an act of treason against both Acorn’s supporters and the people they were supposed to help! There is no other word for this level of betrayal. Honestly, what greater crime could an organization commit against the sensibilities and trust of leftists than to support criminal activities that degrade the communities of our nation’s most poor and helpless? What greater sin is there in the leftists’ lexicon than the literal sexual enslavement of children?

Where is the blind rage from the left? Why aren’t they mobbing the offices of Acorn and dragging the corporate officers out into the street?

It's simple. The Left's institutions are dependent on a "cash in envelopes" culture that has long defined the Democratic Party, especially in urban areas. You think they're going to do away with this? It's what keeps them in power! It's politics at its most basic: insiders support one another by ignoring each other's peccadillos, all the while they keep up a steady patter of rhetoic about The Cause, The Dream, Hope, Equality, etc. Some of them may even believe this. But most want to create a system that allows for the maximum extraction of private dollars without burden of asking for it - or taking it - directly. If a dictatorship of the proletariate is the result, all the better.