I suppose I ought to have something to say about the country's latest shiny object—namely, the events surrounding the students from Covington Catholic High School, Omaha elder Nathan Phillips, the Black Israelites, and how the wingnut welfare deflector shields once again managed to obscure the plain-view evidence until such time as earnest liberals predictably chickened out and departed the field.

The events as I understand them:

1) Catholic boys, in town to advocate chucking the privacy rights of 51 percent of Americans overboard, get heckled by a well-known cadre of political loons.

2) CBs heckle back.

3) Nathan Phillips steps in.

4) Phillips chants Native chant that's probably been a prayer longer than "Our Father" has been.

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5) Outraged by one group of loons of color, CBs are compelled, mind you, to mock Phillips because...Not White.

6) Video emerges. Criticism of CBs erupts.

7) Wingnut outrage at high tide.

8) MSM turtles.



It's that last part that makes me laugh. Almost as soon as the maltreatment of elder Phillips hit the Intertoobz, the shields snapped on. First, there was the "whole video" which did indeed include the antics of the Black Israelites, a notorious claque of semi-political crackpots familiar to anyone who has walked the streets of New York or D.C. some time in the past two decades. Miraculously, through the familiar magic of the conservative media, Phillips's actions are somehow conflated with those of the Black Israelites, because, I dunno, Not White. This is all the conservative Wurlitzer needed.

Nathan Phillips Getty Images

Within 48 hours, people were deleting tweets, mournfully "reconsidering" their original revulsion at the behavior of these privileged jackeens, and one of them found himself on the TODAY Show, exhibiting his Internet stigmata to the nation. And all of this is the work of a Republican-connected PR firm run by a fixer who used to work with Mitch McConnell, and therefore was quite familiar with how easily earnest liberals can be mau-mau'ed. I'm sure that the only lawyer/consultant the parents of these embattled bros could find was one that was connected to the Majority Leader of the United States Senate. Yes, and I am the Tsar of all the Russias.

You know what the first thing that came to mind when the tide was turning?

ACORN. And how easy it had been to get a Democratic president and Democratic legislators to sell out one of the most effective groups ever founded with the goal of helping poor people navigate our system of government. As The Huffington Post wrote in a lengthy retrospective, it was the Democrats in Washington who really turned tail and ran.

ACORN had survived for more than 40 years. Its sudden collapse was a defining moment in 21st century American politics. The explosive cocktail of racism, dishonesty, incompetence and cowardice that brought down the organization reveals as much about Washington Democrats as it does about the conservative movement. It marked the Republican Party’s full transition from the coded winks and nods of Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy” to the bellicose white nativism that defines Donald Trump, and it exposed a Democratic Party establishment unprepared for dirty tricks in the Digital Age and unwilling to defend many of the black voters and activists it claimed to represent...

Mark Wilson Getty Images

But Washington didn’t wait around for the facts to come out. On Sept. 14, 2009, the Democratic-controlled Senate voted 83 to 7 to block some federal grants to ACORN. Government funding typically accounted for 10 to 15 percent of ACORN’s annual funding. The group received $48.4 million from the federal government from 2005 to 2009 ― most of it, including a $25 million grant in 2008, for housing counseling and foreclosure mitigation. On Sept. 17, the House followed suit, with 172 Democrats joining 173 Republicans in voting to defund ACORN, including some of the most progressive voices in the party, such as Reps. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas) and John Conyers (D-Mich.).



Of course, this latest example is far less destructive than the ACORN witch-hunt has proven to be in the long run, but the idea that we can have a fully functioning democracy when one side is willing to use every means, fair or foul, to defend the slightest bit of ideological ground, while the other side's conscience can be pricked with a feather, setting off a paroxysm of penitential maundering, is laughable.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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