Bertha M. Lewis, CEO of the dreaded right wing boogeyman ACORN, is interviewed by Esquire’s John H. Richardson, and mentions Andrew Breitbart’s crazy accusation (that he finally retracted yesterday after leaving it hanging out there for 6 days): Acorn Group vs Fox News - Interview with Bertha Lewis of ACORN Group.

Still, Lewis seemed almost shell-shocked: “We can’t understand this obsession, and the vehemence. They just make up something and keep repeating it over and over — yesterday, I’m cleaning my house and I get a call, someone from my office saying ‘This guy from Breitbart is going crazy saying you were in the White House!’ Apparently some woman named Bertha Lewis visited the White House in September, so automatically they assumed — but it wasn’t me.”

Lewis’s take on the infamous “sting” videos engineered by Breitbart is also interesting:

By 2004, the hostility directed toward ACORN had become “very, very intense,” Lewis told me. But it was the Obama election in 2008 that really sent things into overdrive. “We said, ‘Oh, we’re just a surrogate for Obama — first there was Jeremiah Wright, then there was Bill Ayres, now it’s us.’ We thought, naively, they’re running a campaign, and it’ll all die down. But it really was surprising to us how intense it became. After almost forty years of making some very powerful enemies, it was like a perfect storm. And it hasn’t let up. It’s pretty amazing to me how the right can keep this obsession going.”

The most surreal moment, in her words, were the infamous “pimp and prostitute” videotapes. Although the videotapes do show ACORN employees giving tax and housing advice to people who seem to be flagrant criminals, Lewis insists that the videotape doesn’t show all that happened. “Our folks did say, ‘Do you want us to get the police, how can we help you?’ But when you look at it, the tapes are so clearly edited that the voiceover questions you hear are not what our folks are responding to.”

The larger question, in Lewis’s mind, was the idea of the sting itself. “You can disagree with registering people, with the policy stands we take — that’s fine, that’s what this country is about. But to make up this prurient scenario in order to keep us as a target, that is the most frightening. It’s incredible that folks would go that far.”

It does seem significant that the filmmakers have refused to release the raw footage, and unfair to condemn the entire organization based on the stupid behavior of a handful of low-level employees. (Imagine if the same standards were applied to Congress or the Catholic Church, much less a poverty group that relies on low-paid employees.) But the result of the videotapes was the vote in Congress pulling ACORN’s funding, a move that cost the group $2-3 million in government funding and maybe another $2-3 million in matching funds, Lewis says. “And not only did they say that you can’t apply for funding but also anyone associated with you — that sent out a chill.”

As a result, ACORN had to fire one hundred people (out of a total staff of about five hundred) and reduce another two hundred to part-time status. Among other things, this meant cuts in programs to help the poor with fire prevention, lead abatement, tax preparation, foreclosure counseling, and other housing problems that, again, needed listening to.

And this is — no other word for it — embarrassing.