Well, not really a surprise. This what liberals always do. They get caught doing naughty things and then they sue those that expose them. ACORN has now filed suit against Brietbart’s BigGovernment.com, O’Keefe and his partner Giles because Maryland law requires two party consent for audio recordings of conversations. The short explanation for such a law is that Maryland wants to protect people too stupid to watch what they do when interacting with other people and who might discuss illegal acts. Personally the law is probably borderline unconstitutional because it prohibits someone from obtaining evidence as to what someone else said in a conversation (without their consent) so that party A can defend themselves against party B in case of a slander or libel lawsuit. Such is a dangerous restriction to place on free speech as it leads to situations where speech might not be engaged in because even though both parties know what was said, the party seeking to expose it would not be able to prove it with such a law. It also hinders freedom of the press and reporting and the ability to back up one’s story.
That aside, the complaint is really typical liberal psychobabble:
But ACORN says no tax returns were actually prepared at the Baltimore office, and that the audio portion of the video recorded there was obtained illegally, since Maryland requires two-party consent for sound recordings. The multimillion-dollar lawsuit cites “extreme emotional distress” on behalf of two workers who were fired after the video was posted online.
The videos were “clear violations of Maryland law that were intended to inflict maximum damage to the reputation of ACORN, the nation’s largest grassroots organizer of low-income and minority Americans,” said ACORN attorney Arthur Schwartz. “Unfortunately they succeeded.”
Problems with this line of “logic” are many. First of all and most prevalent however is that the employees willfully engaged in the conduct caught on tape so any “emotional distress” that was suffered by them for now not being able to help tax cheats or set up child prostitution rings was brought on by their own actions not O’Keefe or Giles. Second of all, whether or not the actions were intended to damage ACORN’s reputation or not is a moot point as, once again, it was indeed ACORN’s own employees that engaged in several illegal acts on tape. The damage to their reputation, as low as it is, is again by their own doing. As for ACORN’s organizing activities you note there is no mention of tax cheats and pimps of child prostitutes included conveniently in that list.
As for the, “unfortunately they succeeded,” comment, well, I take it we can assume that ACORN finds it unfortunate that people expose those attempting to aid and abet tax cheats as well as those trying to aid and abet those attempting to set up child prostitution rings. I don’t think ACORN or thier lawyers think too much before they issue such idiotic comments because they look absolutely silly when they are placed in context.
Sadly for ACORN all their attempts at deflecting blame just continues to show that they don’t much care about the truth. If they were an honest organization they would have weeded out this rampant and apparently easy to find corruption on their own or at the very least praised O’Keefe and Giles for helping them find out about something they were apparently blind to … yeah right. ACORN knew this was going on. They knew that their employees were helping people break the law. Just watch the tapes and see how easily each of the workers confronted give advice without much thought and how often it happened. That sort of response does not come from people that are not used to giving such things on a regular basis.
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