Opinion

A FEW BAD APPLES?

The folks over at ACORN – Barack Obama’s favorite “community organizers” – now admit that more than 30 percent of the 1.3 million voter-registration forms they submitted this year were rejected by election officials nationwide.

So much for claims by the left that the issue is nothing to worry about.

Never mind all those applications by Mickey Mouse and Jive Turkey.

ACORN says no more than “1 to 1.5 percent” involved actual fraud – which was committed, according to their friends at The New York Times, by “low-income field workers trying to please their supervisors.” They were only following orders, you see . . .

Then again, yesterday’s Times admits that ACORN-related voting fraud seems “to have resonated” – even among some Democrats and independents.

And with good reason.

Just a few days earlier, People for the American Way, the left-wing advocacy group, took out a full-page ad in the Times defending ACORN.

Charges of fraud, said the ad, are all a bunch of lies cooked up by “right-wing operatives” intent on keeping “low-income people and African-Americans from voting.”

Maybe there were some problems with ACORN’s voter registrations, the ad says, but only “a few bad apples” were responsible.

Too bad People for the American Way couldn’t read the same day’s Times before it placed that ad.

Because a long story a couple of pages later cites a report by ACORN’s own lawyer that says the relationships between the group’s 174 affiliates may have violated multiple federal laws.

The report raises problems, the article adds, about possible illegal use of charitable dollars for political purposes, improper money transfers and conflicts created by employees working for ACORN affiliates.

The report also addresses the $1 million embezzled by the brother of ACORN’s founder and secretly hushed up for years by the organization – saying the group will have to call in “a knowledgeable, white-collar criminal attorney.”

ACORN is under investigation in a dozen states in connection with its voter-registration schemes.

In July 2007, it settled the largest case of voter fraud in Washington state history. Three ACORN election hoaxers pleaded guilty; a prosecutor called ACORN’s criminal sabotage “an act of vandalism upon the voter rolls.”

And let’s not forget ACORN’s history, dating to the ’80s, of trespassing, illegal seizure of private property, physical harassment, intimidation and outright extortion.

A few bad apples?

More like an orchard’s worth.