Funny...he doesn't look like a gangster

Funny...he doesn't look like a gangster

 MBA

Yesterday, the United States Senate — perhaps finally starting to see the train coming down the tracks and bearing down upon it in the form of vicious public scorn of Congress and anybody, from any party, who inhabits (or infests) the place — voted 83-7 to voted to approve an amendment that would preclude ACORN from receiving DOT and HUD federal funding in the future.

My initial take is that this is a very good thing.  ACORN has been receiving federal dollars — under both Democratic and Republican administrations – going back to the early 1990s (something like 53 million, in total) to, in effect, undermine the very government from whose teat it so greedily sucks.  Truly, this is a case where a recent immigrant to our shores might say in his best East Indian accent “Only in Ah-mare-ee-kah!”

Leaving aside the brazen audacity of an organization which has had a hand-in-hand relationship with the Democratic Party for at least this last decade, I find myself bemused on a number of fronts.

For one, ACORN  has had what can only be described as a scandalous week, with many more of them soon to appear, we’re being told.  This alone should have been enough to get through to even the least intelligent among the members of “the greatest deliberative body in the world.” 

But no, it didn’t.  There were actually 7 Senators (really, 6 Dems and one “Independent”) who are so beholden to the criminal, uh…I mean  community organization that they just couldn’t find it within themselves to vote with their peers on this matter.

Is he the leader of the pack?

Is he the leader of the pack?

The most charitable characterization of ACORN’s guilt in more than a few instances is that there looks to be  a mountain of evidence of unlawful and illegal activity which is being carried on by Barack Obama’s favorite community organization.  And that’s being charitable, remember.

That didn’t seem to phase the “Big Seven,” though, many of whom said (if they were willing to go on the record at all) that it was unfair to the wider mission of the group, and which the junior Senator from New York, Kirsten Gillibrand, said would hurt more people than the action against ACORN would help.

I don’t know about that sort of utilitarian — and extremely foolish — argument, and I especially don’t why somebody who once professed to be a Blue Dog Democrat in the House of Representatives would align herself with what are basically criminal elements.  But, she’s from the Empire State and she has to appease the New York City base of voters she so desperately needs in the 2010 election, as morally reprehensible as that move is.

The rest of the gang of pathetickers consists of what we might call “the usual suspects:”

-  Roland Burris and Dick Durbin, of Illinois

-  Pat Leahy and the socialist Bernie Sanders, of Vermont

-  Sheldon Whitehouse, of Rhode Island

-  And a mild shocker in Pennsylvania’s Bob Casey. 

Again, it looks like Casey — who appears to fallen far away from the tree that was his father (a pro-lifer, no less) — saw that he’d better throw in with the devil standing in front of him rather than go against that devil’s big voting bloc existing in the big cities lying in the eastern part of the state.

Burris and Durbin — one an amiable dunce who owes his presence in the senate to disgraced former governor Rod Blagojevich and the other a man more comfortable referring to American troops as Nazis or worst — are joined at the hip to Barack Obama and wouldn’t go against him under any circumstance, so they’ll eventually reap what they’ve helped to sow, I’d say.

Pat Leahy jumped the shark long ago and is only a millimeter from descending into full-on moonbattery, lately.  He’d be in good company, though, as his partner there would be his fellow Vermonter, the always entertaining and manic Bernie Sanders, who probably only calls himself a socialist because even the folks in Vermont — at present — couldn’t stomach having a real communist as one of their elected representatives.

Sanders is his man in the Senate

Sanders is his man in the Senate

Sheldon Whitehouse, who hails from Rhode Island, has support for organizations like ACORN deeply embedded within his DNA.  I was once stationed in that fine New England state, where I spent some time at the large Navy base at Newport, and I don’t remember the politicians there back then being quite so shabbily radical.  Heck, the place even has a Republican governor these days.  What’s going on?

What are we to make of a group of men (and one woman) who don’t have the moral compass necessary to navigate through such shoals in order to get their constituencies to safe harbor? 

What does it say about the voters who pass judgment on these folks (with the exception of Burris, who engineered a governor’s appointment)?  History will not judge either group kindly, I’d say.