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.

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This post debunks several liberal myths about ACORN that have emerged in recent weeks — many from Eric Boehlert of Media Matters and Brad Friedman.

POSING AS A PIMP AT ACORN

Liberal Myth: James O’Keefe did not pretend to be a pimp inside ACORN. Instead, he merely presented himself as Hannah Giles’s boyfriend, trying to help her escape from an abusive pimp.

Examples of the spreading of the myth:

Eric Boehlert:

O’Keefe pretended to be an aspiring pol, not pimp, in first ACORN vid.

Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon:

The video implies that the advice about the 13-year-olds was given with the intent of helping a pimp control them. This doesn’t fit the circumstances. In fact, it appears that what happened was that employees were responding to requests on how to get young girls out of sex work, not keep them in.

Brad Friedman:

After not hearing from New York Times Public Editor Clark Hoyt for nearly a week — during which I’d sent him more and more indisputable evidence that Andrew Breitbart employee James O’Keefe never played his infamous “pimp” character in the offices of ACORN — he responded with a couple of blistering charges. (more…)