Busting the Worst Little ACORN Lobbyist in Texas

I take grim personal satisfaction in this PolitiFact fact-check.

Casting your political foe as a lobbyist — and hence beholden to some special interest — can make for explosive campaign fodder.

So it is that the Republican Party of Texas targets first-term state Rep. Kristi Thibaut, D-Houston. Dem State Rep Kristi Thibaut was an #ACORN lobbyist,” the party tweeted Aug. 31, linking to a web video. Earlier the same day, the party had tweeted: “Democrat State Rep. Kristi Thibaut, HD133, was a lobbyist for corrupt ACORN” and before that, “find out which Dem state Rep was a lobbyist for ACORN.”

That was me in my previous job, doing all that tweeting.  At the Republican Party of Texas, we had launched a web site detailing how state Rep. Kristi Thibaut, a freshman Democrat in the state House, had worked for the ultra-corrupt and corrupting ACORN.  What typically happened when I’d tweet something hot, was that the Texas Democrats’ house blog, Burnt Orange Report, or its operatives would flag the PolitiFact Texas crew on what I’d tweeted or said, and here would come PolitiFact to bug me.  I don’t know whether the BORbots were involved in this one or not; either way, the case against state Rep. Kristi Thibaut is open and shut.  She was a lobbyist for ACORN, and in office has continued to act on the group’s behalf.  Kind of like someone else in a slightly higher office.

Typically, PolitiFact finds some way to spin everything we say as “False” or even “Pants on Fire.”  This time, we rated a “True” in spite of PolitiFact’s best spin cycle efforts.

Thibaut is like a lot of Democrats who took office in 2008.  They have past associations with radical groups like ACORN and they probably wouldn’t have won in any other year.  But 2008 wasn’t any other year.  2010 won’t be any other year, either, and it’s likely that Thibaut and hundreds more like her all over the country will be heading back to the lefty activist world on November 3.  Not that, even in office, they ever really left the lefty activist world.