Vindication for ACORN?

After much uproar over James O’Keefe’s “clever” undercover videos about the tiny* community organization ACORN, the results of an independent investigation are in, and ACORN has been cleared of institutional wrongdoing.

While some of the advice and counsel given by ACORN employees and volunteers was clearly inappropriate and unprofessional, we did not find a pattern of intentional, illegal conduct by ACORN staff; in fact, there is no evidence that action, illegal or otherwise, was taken by any ACORN employee on behalf of the videographers.

It gets better:

The videos that have been released appear to have been edited, in some cases substantially, including the insertion of a substitute voiceover for significant portions of Mr. O’Keefe’s and Ms. Giles’s comments, which makes it difficult to determine the questions to which ACORN employees are responding. A comparison of the publicly available transcripts to the released videos confirms that large portions of the original video have been omitted from the released versions.

The title sequences of O’Keefe in the ridiculous “pimp” outfit really underscored the professionalism of his “investigation”; I’m not the least bit surprised that there would be heavy evidence of editing on his part to paint the picture he wanted to paint, rather than something authentic.

* “tiny” compared to the other entities – say, defense contractors – swept up in John Boehner’s poorly written Defund ACORN Act. Yes, that’s really what it was called.