ellisad01: Cheers and Jeers: Tuesday

Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Cheers and Jeers: Tuesday

From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE?

Don?t Shit in Our Yard, You Twit

I thought something smelled bad. It was a pungent, sour, nutty smell I'd last gotten a whiff of when I used to lived down the road from a sugar beet processing plant in Bay City, Michigan. There's no sugar beet plant here in Maine, though, so the foul stench could only mean one thing: someone associated with James O'Keefe had arrived and laid a big ol' turd.

Sure enough, last Friday the "news" broke that a "shocking" undercover video had turned up EXPLOSIVE EVIDENCE of MASSIVE WIDESPREAD FRAUD AND ABUSE in Maine's welfare system. It was so damning that it sent the nervous ninnies from Maine's Heritage Foundation clone and Americans (Excluding Non-Millionaire Americans) for Prosperity to the fainting couch, but not before they dashed off their EXPLOSIVE PRESS RELEASES. We're doomed, they said. The welfare cheats have destroyed the hopes and dreams of every child and stolen their lollipops to boot, they said. AND IT'S ON VIDEO! (They're fond of caps.)

Just one tiny detail, and one you know all too well: currently-on-probation James O'Keefe runs a dishonest "gotcha" syndicate that has yet to hit the bullseye once. In this case, he and his conservative orcs are clutching their pearls because?well, because they played dress-up, went to a DHHS office, and did nothing but get some blank forms after wasting half an hour of a couple state employees' time.

In fact, James O'Keefe failed so miserably that even our Republican tea party governor let him have it with both barrels: "I do not believe for a second that the individual involved was willfully allowing abuse of the welfare program."

Said the Portland Press Herald's editorial board:

No welfare system, including Maine's, is immune to fraud, and our state has uncovered instances of cheating in the past. The governor is right in wanting employees to be better prepared to deal with potential cheaters, but we would hope that the increased training will be geared more toward real-world threats to the integrity of the system than toward camera-wielding hucksters looking to capture headlines.

O'Keefe's response after learning his Maine footage had ended up in the dumpster? Paraphrasing here: "It's the lamestream media's fault! They're the ones not catching all this not-fraud stuff! Shame on them for not yelling 'Fire' in the absence of smoke!"

But, ultimately, O'Keefe's conspiracy porn isn't designed for anyone in the reality-based community. It's gut-level crack for the idiots out there who are so void of critical-thinking skills that they could be shown a video of paint drying on a wall and be convinced it's a liberal plot to take away their freedom. And that's exactly what I heard Saturday morning on our local conservative talk radio station, which opened up the discussion to callers: paranoia and resentment of "them freeloaders" that was so thick you could put a tri-corner hat on it and call it Louie Gohmert.

Meanwhile the overworked and underpaid DHHS office employees involved, who did a fine job dealing with O'Keefe's dress-up nutball faker, have been dragged through the muck and falsely tarred as the public face of waste, fraud and abuse. I feel bad for them because that face, of course, looks a lot more like O'Keefe's, given his pathetic record of whiffing at every underhanded thing he does. (Did I mention he's on probation? That was a particularly dumb whiff.)

To recap: An idiot came to Maine to cause trouble. He got rode out on a rail. The End.

Cheers and Jeers starts below the fold... [Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]