For the last week or so, there has been a growing controversy over the activities of ACORN which Wikipedia describes as “a collection of community-based organizations in the United States that advocate for low- and moderate-income families by working on neighborhood safety, voter registration, health care, affordable housing, and other social issues.” ACORN became a flashpoint during the last presidential election, because Republicans wanted to tie Barack Obama to allegations of voter fraud by ACORN.

When the election ended, the campaign to destroy Obama and ACORN did not. So, a couple of kids dressed up as a pimp and prostitute went to various ACORN offices and tried to catch staff members giving them advice on how to break the law. The staff in some of the ACORN offices obliged and a sh*t storm ensued.

To make a long story short, Congress felt the heat and immediately moved to defund ACORN and any organization “that has been charged with breaking federal or state election laws, lobbying disclosure laws, campaign finance laws or filing fraudulent paperwork with any federal or state agency. It also applies to any of the employees, contractors or other folks affiliated with a group charged with any of those things.”

According to HuffPo, the language in the bill is so broad that it applies to all the big players in the military industrial complex, like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and General Electric (you can see a list of the offending companies here).

This highlights the shame of the conservative/Republican crusade against ACORN. According to the Washington Examiner, ACORN only received $15 million $53 million in Federal dollars since 1994. I don’t think I have to tell you that $15 million $53 million is nothing compared to the hundreds of billions we throw at defense contractors like Boeing every single year. It doesn’t compare to the trillions we’ve given given to banks through bailouts and Fed loans just in the last year. And yet, conservatives don’t seem to care at all about them.

On the contrary, Obama was painted by conservative critics as soft on national security for trying to scrap the wasteful F-22 jet fighter. Democrats were painted as communists for trying to reign in executive salaries at banks that received bailout money. The same is happening now while Obama and Democrats try to reign in wasteful health insurance companies that receive billions in government dollars. Conservatives don’t just ignore these larger cases of fraud and misconduct, they cheer them on and defend them whole heartedly.

So I’m making a plea to our conservative friends. Now that you’ve destroyed ACORN, turn your rhetorical guns on the bigger cases of fraud. Expose Boeing, expose Lockheed Martin. Show us that you’re opposition to abuse of government money is more than political opportunism.