The ACORN story is not difficult to understand.  It is about a simple sting operation designed to reveal that a prominent organization routinely aids illegal activity.  When James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles walked into ACORN offices posing as a pimp and prostitute seeking to set up a brothel stocked by underage girls from central America, ACORN employees were only too happy to help – and no doubt, they had been only too happy to help real pimps and prostitutes in the past.

Did those employees commit a crime in offering to help O’Keefe and Giles themselves?  Of course not, because O’Keefe and Giles weren’t actually a pimp and prostitute.  All conspiracy crimes (which this would have been) require that there be an underlying criminal act – if no such criminal act exists, then conspiracy cannot be prosecuted.  This makes sense.  If you and I have a conspiracy to go to Baskin-Robbins, it is not a criminal conspiracy because no criminal act was ever in the offing.  If a guy solicits an undercover police officer posing as a 12-year-old girl online, that’s not a crime unless the state legislature has specifically carved out such a situation.  Similarly, in this case, no criminal act was in the offing because O’Keefe and Giles were never going to set up a whorehouse.

Duh.

According to California Attorney General Jerry “Moonbeam” Brown, this is some sort of massive revelation.  In his press release, misleadingly entitled “Brown Releases Report Detailing a Litany of Problems with ACORN, But No Criminality,” Brown stated that ACORN had failed to “recruit, train and monitor its employees to ensure compliance [with state law,” ACORN had violated state civil laws in dumping 20,000 pages of records, four instances of “possible voter registration fraud in San Diego in connection with the 2008 election,” and failure to file a tax return for 2007.  These all sound a lot like criminality, and that criminality never would have been discovered except for O’Keefe and Giles raising ACORN’s profile.

Nonetheless, the point that the media latched onto was that Brown had found that in their interactions with O’Keefe and Giles, ACORN broke no laws.  Again, duh.  O’Keefe and Giles weren’t a real pimp and prostitute, so of course no laws were broken.

But Brown is interested in PR, not in the basic law or the basic facts.  So he twists his report to make it sound as though if the YouTube videos had in fact shown the complete story, it would have been criminal, but that the videos were selectively edited, and that unprovided portions actually exonerated ACORN employees of guilt.

The evidence illustrates that things are not always as partisan zealots portray them through high selective editing of reality.  Sometimes a fuller truth is found on the cutting room floor.

What fuller truth, exactly?  What were the segments found on the cutting room floor that got ACORN off the hook?  Brown doesn’t say, because they don’t exist.  What really got ACORN off the hook is that O’Keefe and Giles aren’t a pimp and prostitute.

Rachel Maddow doesn’t know anything about law, and she’s not interested in what’s on the tapes.  (Plus she looks like Anthony “Scooter” Teague from How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. Or, as my friend Rusty Humphries says, like Matthew Perry in the early years of Friends.  Question: if she and Anderson Cooper had a baby, who would be the father?  Answer: George Soros.  But that’s neither here nor there.).

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