Topic: Capital Research Center
The Capital Research Center's Matthew Vadum has attacked us in an Oct. 15 post, calling us "mendacious masochists" and a smear site" for pointing out a false claim he made regarding Barack Obama's relationship with ACORN and goes on to say we "should do some research for a change."
Actually, we did do our research. But Vadum didn't address what we actually said.
If you'll recall, we were pointing out that Newsmax's Lowell Ponte cited Vadum as his source for claiming that Project Vote was "ACORN’s voter mobilization entity" at the time Obama worked for the group in 1992 -- language lifted almost verbatim from Vadum's CRC report on the subject -- when in fact Project Vote was not a part of ACORN in 1992.
In his blog post, Vadum cites another report that he says "makes it abundantly clear that ACORN and Project Vote were partners in the voter registration drive led by Obama." But that's a different claim than the one we were addressing.
We never claimed that ACORN didn't play a role in the Project Vote operation Obama was a part of in 1992. We are taking issue with Vadum's claim that Project Vote was "ACORN's voter mobilization arm" in 1992. As ACORN itself stated, "At that time, Project Vote had no more connection to ACORN than it did with dozens of other national and local organizations with which it partnered on local registration drives."
Where's Vadum's evidence contradicting that? We see none. And his insistence that it's an "invented claim" doesn't count because he doesn't back that up either.
Vadum thinks he issued "another good beating" upon us. That presumes he did so the first time (which he didn't).
If this is Vadum's idea of a beatdown, about all we can say in response is: Thank you, sir, may we have another?
