GOP Fights Straw Man. Wins!

And so, once again, the crackerjack Republican-led House of Representatives has voted to defund the anti-poverty group, ACORN.  Because after all, nothing in the world says "rolling in money and not needing funding," like an anti-poverty group does.

Of course, the reality is that ACORN doesn't exist anymore.  And it hasn't existed since 2009.

Mind you, that hasn't stopped the tunnel-vision, lock-step Republicans from voting to defund the non-existent ACORN 13 times.

There are only two explanations for this that I can think of -- 1) House Republicans are really, really stupid, or 2) House Republicans are really, really cold-hearted and mean.  There's the dead body, here's the pile of dirt.  Keep shoveling on.  There's the wound, here's the salt.  Pour.

To be clear, that doesn't mean that the GOP isn't trying to figure out some gumfummery explanation for this. 

The spokeswoman for the GOP majority on the House Appropriations Committee, Jennifer Hing told the Huffington Post, "Some of these were added via amendments on the House floor, so it was a fluid process."

A fluid process.  Water leaking from a broken pipe is a "fluid process."  The Titanic sinking in the middle of the ocean was a fluid process.  "We just put this in all the time by default without thinking how stupid or mean it makes us look" is a fluid process.

By the way, none of this has anything to do with whether ACORN should ever have been defunded in the first place and put out of business.  ACORN is one of the most wrongly-maligned organizations that actually helped people, topping probably even Planned Parenthood.  But that's another matter.

Actually, my favorite quote in a Huffington Post article about this was -- ""Word is the majority will also prohibit foreign aid to the Ottoman Empire this year," a Democratic congressional aide snarked to HuffPost. (Like ACORN, the Ottoman Empire does not exist.)"

My favorite part of that, though, was not the very funny comment about the GOP voting against funding for the Ottoman Empire.  It's the publication knowing its readership and thinking too many of them might not know that the Ottoman Empire no longer exists.  But then, given that the Ottoman Empire had its heyday in the 16th century, though didn't officially disbanded in 1922, almost a century ago, all that was before the Internet, so maybe it's understandable...

In the end, considering what conservatives and the Republican Party has done to ACORN -- and keeps doing to the non-existent organization -- a fluid leak seems a pretty good term.