Is ACORN the greatest danger to American democracy?

That's what McCain said in the last debate--probably the single most irresponsible statement made in the whole debate series.

I do agree that ACORN is doing something wrong: it's taking monies it has received for legitimate purposes and diverting those monies into handouts for street people, who then did their jobs with the kind of diligence you'd expect from, say, a crack addict.

The way the left pulls stunts like this--and the way the right morphs this nonsense into dark conspiracy theories in an effort to win elections by hook or by crook--exemplifies the perils of American democracy that Alexis de Toqueville warned about over 150 years ago.

How about this: make it illegal to pay people to register voters unless they're bonded. And stop sending taxpayer dollars to ACORN until they quit diverting voter drive money into their help-crack-addicts-gets-more-crack project.

And for some real election reform, how aboput a bipartisan national drive to make the job of state election chief a nonpartisan position? Having rabid partisans like Katherine Harris run their states' elections is a vastly worse problem than ACORN's idiotic malfeasance.