The left was against voter fraud before they were for it, Part I

ACORN is fighting back hard against the damage they're doing to the Obama campaign, and 2008's most entertaining special interest group--Journalists for Obama--is fighting back with them.

(You know that Journalists for Obama are part of the pushback when they start putting vote fraud in quotes, as in "McCain decries 'vote fraud'").

In Part II, I'll discuss why the reasons ACORN and their friends in the media are putting forward are both poor and irrelevant excuses for ACORN's conduct.

Right now, I just want to focus on those halcyon days not so long ago when the left and the DNC were against fraud.

It was 2004 and Ralph Nader was running for president. Still livid at Nader from the 2000 presidential fiasco, a cadre of Democrats and leftists led by Toby Moffett sprang into action. In state after state, Moffett tasked what was a team of ultimately 95 lawyers from 53 Democrat-associated law firms to get Nader kicked off the ballot in states where his name had already been certified by election officials to appear. The effort succeeded in 18 states and led to Nader's 2007 lawsuit, Nader v. the Democratic National Committee; SEIU and the Soros-funded America Coming Together participated in the anti-ballot access activities of Moffett's gang of election integrity lawyers.

The Democrats repeatedly told Kit Seelye, who covered the whole sorry debacle for the New York Times, that, aw shucks, they had no partisan motivation to kick Nader off ballots he'd already been certified for. No! They just couldn't sleep in their beds for the thought that some of the signatures on petitions might have been duplicates or forgeries and that's what motivated them to swoop into one Secretary of State office after the next to ruthlessly scrutinize signatures gathered on street corners for any little nit they could pick.

For example, in Oregon in 2004, "the Service Employees International Union, which has endorsed Mr. Kerry, said that an initial examination of signatures filed there found that at least two-thirds were forged, had the wrong address or otherwise constituted what the union called ''overwhelming and systemic fraud'".  The horror!  Overwhelming and systemic fraud!

( Democrats' legal challenges impede Nader campaign )

To read the NYT's October Nader Ballot Petitions Present a Phone Book Full of Problems and compare it to the deification of ACORN one knows not whether to laugh or weep.

Try, "The Democrats, however, accuse Mr. Nader of knowingly committing fraud. While it is not illegal to pay people to collect signatures, lawyers argue that the campaign submitted signatures despite knowing that the people who collected them had simply copied names, alphabetically, from the phone book. "We think that signing papers to get someone on the ballot is a sacred process, and people ought to follow the law," said Efrem Grail, a lawyer on the team that disputed signatures in Pittsburgh. "Ralph Nader ought to know better. And you know what, he does know better."

Four short years later, and the mainstream media believes that voter fraud is just a tiny little problem on the margin, nothing to expose, and at worst the inevitable side effect of the heroic work of registering voters, whereas back in 2004, fraud was cause for grave concern and the work of signature collectors standing on sidewalks asking people to engage in the political process was close to a criminal enterprise.

The hypocrisy is breathtaking, and it doesn't end there.

Stay tuned.