More WorldNutDaily Stupidity on the ACLU

It's amusing to watch Farah and his minions at the WorldNutDaily work themselves into a rage at the ACLU. They spit and sputter and contradict themselves and display rank hypocrisy, knowing full well that most of their readers are too clueless to catch them at it. The latest example is this "exclusive" whistleblower article (naturally, you have to pay to see the actual article; WND prints virtually nothing that isn't tied to something they're pimping for profit). This time they're up in arms over the fact that when the ACLU sues a governmental body successfully, the legal fees are usuallly awarded to the plaintiffs and the defenendents have to pay them. But of course, this outrage is highly selective:

What you probably don't know is that the ACLU is using your money to do it - such as when it received close to half a million taxpayer dollars after successfully suing to have the 10 Commandments removed from Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore's courthouse.

That's the stunning, in-depth, investigative story told for the first time in the December edition of WorldNetDaily's monthly Whistleblower magazine, titled "EXTORTION: How the ACLU is destroying America using your money."

Oooh, it's "stunning" and "in-depth". Uh, no it's not. It's quite well known and entirely legal. The law allowing plaintiffs to recover legal fees in advocacy lawsuits has been on the books for a long time. The only time the wingnuts bitch about this is when groups they disagree with benefit from it. The Alliance Defense Fund suit against the school in Cupertino, California over the teacher's handouts about religion in history is also asking for the school district to pay the legal fees of the plaintiff. Where are the Worldnutdaily screams of "EXTORTION"? Well, that's different. It's only a bad thing when they disagree with the suit, you see. But not satisfied with mere hypocrisy, they also add this time-worn lie:

More than any other group, the American Civil Liberties Union - founded by avowed communist Roger Baldwin - is behind what many are calling a legal jihad against public expression of the Christian faith in America.

See, you can't write a "stunning and in-depth" expose on the ACLU without this little half-truth in there. Baldwin was, as a young man, a Popular Front socialist. But in the mid 1930s, after witnessing what was going on in the Soviet Union and elsewhere, he disavowed communism and led a purge to remove any communists from the organization. He revised the ACLU charter to prevent anyone who was a member of any totalitarian organization from holding any authority in it, and in a famous fight, had Elizabeth Gurley Flynn removed from the ACLU board after an organizational "trial" in which he acted as prosecutor. He subsequently went on to write the book A New Slavery in which he condemned the policies of communist regimes, especially in the far east, where he traveled widely, and was picked by none other than Douglas MacArthur to accompany him to Japan and help write the new Japanese constitution and help establish a free and democratic form of government there.

But hey, why let such trifling little details get in the way of perfectly good propaganda? If their readers want to blame it all on those nasty commies, then by God we'll give 'em nasty commies. That'll keep the money flowing in.