Training Them Not to Get Caught

From the NY Post:

ALBANY -- Threatened with a national freeze on the taxpayer dollars that fund it, the embattled activist group ACORN announced yesterday it was turning over a new leaf.

National ACORN CEO Bertha Lewis abruptly suspended housing programs exposed in a series of undercover video stings in recent days and ordered emergency training sessions for all frontline workers.

Ms. Lewis of course hasn't ordered training sessions, ACORN employees are already superbly trained--note in those videos their facility with tax rules and forms and how to cheat on them. Rather, she has likely ordered retraining sessions, possibly along these lines: "Never offer aid to thugs unless you are sure they are real thugs; at the very least run a criminal background check."

Like all radical left organizations, ACORN believes the ends justify the means and Friedrich A. Hayek had the take on that long before ACORN even existed (from The Road to Serfdom):

Advancement within a totalitarian group or party depends largely on a willingness to do immoral things. The principle that the end justifies the means, which in individualist ethics is regarded as the denial of all morals, in collectivist ethics becomes necessarily the supreme rule. There is literally nothing which the consistent collectivist must not be prepared to do if it serves "the good of the whole," because that is to him the only criterion of what ought to be done.

Let us also not forget what former New York Mayor Koch said of so-called "first offenders:" "A first offender is in reality usually a multiple offender who is being caught for the first time." ACORN will be in the news again soon enough (but not, of course, in the New York Times).