From little ACORNs mighty conspiracy theories grow

So you’ve heard about ACORN and its voter registration drives where convicted felons are registering Mickey Mouse to vote 72 times across at least 12 different states.  Needless to say this is red meat to the RNC, and the conservative right.  Sort of like Dick Cheney’s connection to Diebold is for the liberal left.  This is very troubling, but not because McCain thinks ACORN is a threat to democracy, after all, I don’t think Micky Mouse is actually going to try to vote 72 times.

This is troubling because it is an example of a nasty trend on both sides of the spectrum, a trend that is much more threatening to the democratic process than a non-profit with lax hiring process and more interest in showing completed forms than actually registering voters.  What is happening, since the 2000 election, is a marked tendency at the fringe to attack the electoral process itself.  There are a disturbing number of people who’ve been convinced that our current president stole two elections.  Those tactics of delegitimatizing the Bush presidency have not been lost on the right, and the people who’ve learned that lesson will be trumpeting ACORN’s electoral malfeasance throughout an Obama presidency, especially given his connection to, and subsequent distancing himself from it.

Every cycle we go through where cynical nimrods attack the electoral process because the “wrong guy” won, is another cycle closer to the last one.  You know, the one where an unpopular president gets to void the election results that cost him his job because the whole process is in doubt.