Tuesday, April 29, 2008

The Boundless, Preening Asshattery


Of John Stossel.

OK, on the one hand this is kind of unfair. I mean, everybody knows Stossel is the Michael Medved of major network advocacy reporting and that scoring off of him is like beating up on a backwards child that’s been tranked into a coma.

Everyone knows that his “Porn Star Moustache of Quivering, Randite Indignation” schitck has grown so pathologically pro-corporate (best summed up here with this quote:
‘It's that government intervention that really gets to Stossel: "Governments, because they're monopolies, just tend not to do things very well. I thought we learned that watching the fall of the Soviet bloc, but apparently not."

Once, ABC anchor John Miller (7/19/02) asked Stossel a straight-forward question: "Has government ever, in the history of time, done something more effectively than a private outfit?" Stossel's response: "Not to my knowledge."’

that Stossel -- like all fanatically government-loathing wingnuts from any point along the Tom-DeLay-to-Tim McVeigh-spectrum -- will merrily discard whole mountains of inconvenient facts when they don’t fit the monomania of his tantrum du jour.

But on the other hand, Stossel is not merely a fucktard; he is a fucktard who dangerously misleads millions of teevee viewers on a regular basis. So unlike a thousand other shrieking pinheads calling into talk radio or falling off of skinhead tavern barstools across this great land of ours, Stossel collects a very juicy paycheck spreading his depraved world view over our airwaves.

He is a man who carves himself out a fine, fat living heroically and ferociously defending the predations of billion-dollar corporations against unarmed citizens, so I really can’t bring myself to feel too bad in making my small contribution in the direction of moving him towards a more hair-net-and-fry-vat-based career.

So let us consider what lengths Mr. “Give me a break!” went to over the weekend to sandbag limo-liberal Arianna Huffington on a variety of issues as she was beginning her book tour.

(Crooks & Liars has the video here.)

First, I should stipulate that this video was not Ms. Huffington finest hour. She looked weak and unprepared. And, for the record, I think her book – “Right is Wrong” -- looks kinda stupid in that Tom-Friedman-breathlessly- announcing-that-Circles-are-Round brand of stupid.

In other words, nothing that stapling together 20 random Left Blogistan
posts from any time in the last five year -- or 20 random paragraphs from any Harlan Ellison essay from the 1980s -- wouldn’t already have told you more succinctly.

(Brief driftglass aside: And WTF is it with Liberals, Progressives and Democrats suddenly getting all horny to go on these wingnut freak shows anyway? Stossel isn’t a journalist; he’s a stooge who hates anything that stands between the defenseless citizen and the unalloyed wonderfulness that is pure, Darwinian market capitalism.

Why is Huffington dignifying this hack by giving him the time of day, much less and interview?

Ah well; different questions for a different day.

End brief driftglass aside)


Now I have no way of knowing if she came across as weak because she was simply weak, or because (as I’d be willing to wager) Stossel ambushed her with a hail of arbitrary charts and statistic she had never seen before built out of data that Stossel had tortured into making false confessions, and then edited the film to put her in the feeblest possible light.

But Ms. Huffington did not come off well. Her answers came across as uncertain, anecdotal and equivocating: as a media creature she should have known better.

However, having stipulated that, there is also no doubt that Stossel was just as full of shit as a Port-O-Let after a marathon laxative-based-chili-eating-contest.

Which is a polite way of saying he lied, tacked his lies to some foam board to make them look official, and used them to beat up a guest he didn’t agree with.

So in the interest of time, lets look at just one of his assertions -- that we don’t need the government involved in workplace safety -- which he actually gets wrong in two excitingly different ways.

Holding up this chart

(which I have reproduced fairly faithfully here by hand as taking a screen capture of the original was getting to be an apparently insoluble pain in the ass) this is what Stossel says (in the video, at around the 6:20 mark):

“Your faith in OSHA is like a religious belief,” Stossel scoffs. “Look at this chart. This shows workplace injuries since OSHA was passed, yes, have gone down. But look at it before OSHA! Things were getting better anyway! It’s like government gets in front of the parade and pretends it’s leading the parade!


First, hey dumbass, your own fucking chart does not show “Workplace Injuries”, it shows “Workplace Fatalities”.

So go fire an intern or something.

Second, note the key inferences:

1. OSHA = “the government”.

2. Since “Things were getting better anyway”, before “the government” intruded, the government is just stealing credit for what the Glorious Private Sector was doing anyway.


But let’s look at the whole graph, shall we?

The one Stossel

didn't show you.

Column 1 represents those events that took place before 1936. Events such as:

The establishment of the Evil Gummint Bureau of Mines by Congress in 1911 in response to the atrocious state of mining safety in the United States. At the time, mining was an occupation that had claimed 13,228 lives between 1906-1911.


And (from Wikipedia)

“The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City on March 25, 1911, was the largest industrial disaster in the history of the city of New York, causing the death of 148 garment workers who either died from the fire or jumped to their deaths.

“It was the worst workplace disaster in New York City until September 11th, 2001. The fire led to legislation requiring improved factory safety standards and helped spur the growth of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, which fought for better working conditions for sweatshop workers in that industry.


Two of many examples from more that half a century before OSHA where catastrophically bad workplace conditions were not rectified until a pile of dead bodies finally forced the Evil Gummint to intervene.

In 1936 (Column 2), the Evil Federal Gummint again stuck its busybody nose in when it passed the Walsh-Healey Act, which

“passed…as part of the New Deal. [It] is a United States federal law which protects employees of government contractors whose contracts exceed USD 10,000. For these employees, it establishes overtime as hours worked in excess of 8 hours per day or 40 hours per week, sets the minimum wage equal to the prevailing wage in an area, and sets standards for child and convict labor, as well as job sanitation and safety standards.”


Bad Gummint! Bad, Bad Gummint!

Also as part of the Evil New Deal, Evil Organized Labor was given the muscle to collectively bargain virtually for the first time without the threat of being jailed, beaten to a pulp or worse. One of the things they demanded was safer working conditions; demands which would never have been possible or honored if the Evil Gummint hadn’t interceded.


In 1947, President Harry Truman convened the Evil Federal Gummint’s “Special Commission on Safety and Health.”

In 1958 (Column 4), the American Society of Safety Engineers (from whose fine website I am cribbing heavily) “conducted research with the Air Force, which led to advances in fall protection belts and harnesses that were later realized in American National Standards.”

Yes, that’s the Evil Gummint Air Force.

In 1964, the Evil Gummint Space Program also cruelly interfered in the marketplace by applying scientific principles to the field of workplace safety and making Systems Safety Management a field of intense research and application.

1964 (Column 5) was also the year the Evil Gummint revised the now-28-years-old Evil Walsh-Healey Act.

All of which only ever-so-lightly-and-for-demonstration-purpose-only touches on a few of the hundreds of instances in which the Evil Gummint -- in fits and starts, by legislation or by creating high standard procurement markets of its own and often over the howling objections of industry -- drove safety standards forward and fatalities down during most of the 20th Century.

It also demonstrates that there is no way even the briefest, honest reading of the facts could lead an impartial observer to conclude that OSHA somehow appeared unbidden and out of nowhere in 1971, or believe that OSHA was conceived as anything other than the culmination of decades of ever-evolving government regulations.

And given the “Global Resources of ABC” (that can spend several million dollars on enough eye-bleeding graphics to make “Nightline” look less like an embarrassing-irrelevant-dungheap-where-Koppel-used-to-be,

and more like a dungheap moving screamingly fast in some sort of Urgently Purposeful direction) there is no doubt that if Stossel and his flying monkeys had the slightest interest in conducting an honest debate they could have easily put together what it took me about 90 minutes of Googling to accomplish: a reasonably accurate set of graphics and narratives from which one could begin an honest conversation about American labor history vis-à-vis safety and government regulation.

Because sometimes regs are too restrictive. Sometimes they are too prescriptive. Sometimes they do go too far.

But of course that is not the conversation Stossel wants to have.

Instead, Stossel relentlessly preaches the Wingnut Fundamentalist's gospel of absolute certainty that Government is Always Wrong and Corporations are Always Right, and let the inconvenient facts be damned.

In a more genteel age, we used to call what Stossel does "shilling".

Or "whoring".

Or just plain "lying".

But in Age of Dubya, now we call it “journalism”.

22 comments:

Anonymous said...

I saw the Stossel interview, and wondered if Arianna had lost her edge.

I don't know what "Right is Wrong" is like, but the argument against Stossel's position is succinctly made in the wonderful "A Day in the Life of Joe Middle-Class Republican" found on a number of sites around the web.

It's a rhetorical mistake to get stuck debating small examples, such as the OSHA data, when instead what you really need is broad, sweeping argument to completely knock the wind out of your opponent's sails. "A Day in the Life" does that beautifully and in far fewer words than "Right is Wrong".

Anonymous said...

I thought Stossel was some kind of fruit filled sugary and cinnamon baked good.

I hate it when I'm wrong.

And yeh, I saw the interview, and Arianna was weak at times. She got a few jabs in, though.

Drifty n Anon got the rest of it covered.

I'm goin out for some Stossel Streussel.

I'm pretty sure it will come up or go out in all the wrong ways. But I'm hooked on the sugar.

Anonymous said...

Geebus, STREUDEL!!!

I meant STREUDEL! Sugar. Cinnamon.

Streusel is, well, not a sugary baked good.

My bad.

Stossel Streusel is what you'd get if ya ground up these putz's of hackneyed hallowed harangue's into a different dish.

Whew, I almost messed all that up. ;-)

[timepasseslaruephreaks]

Damn, I just researched again, streusel DOES have sugar and cinnamon, and it's baked.

Thought it was minced forcemeat and such.

I been out of the trenches for too long, forgotten anything I ever learnt.

Maybe I'll read more and post less . . ;-)

[/larue]

Rehctaw said...

"More Americans get their NEWS from ABC NEWS than from any other source"

Are they still using that slogan? Did Stosh put those stats together too? Using his superior urninalistic skills?

If true Americans are teh stoopidest. And it must be true, because it was on tv right?

CMike said...

Arianna Huffington looked weak?...but, but, she's hated the Clintons and Al Gore* for years, she's behind the Sen. Obama candidacy.

With Arianna at his side, her then husband blew his U. S. Senate race in California because the spectacularly rich undocumented immigrant bashing Huffingtons were exposed for having employed an undocumented nanny for years.
*****************
THE 1994 CAMPAIGN: CALIFORNIA; Campaign Refrain: 'My Opponent's a Hypocrite'

...Mr. Huffington, who has put up more than $25 million of his oil fortune in an unprecedented personal cash effort to win a Congressional seat, spent most of the first part of this week dealing with a damaging disclosure that he had employed an undocumented nanny at his home for five years.

A few days before that disclosure, he had voiced unequivocal support for Proposition 187, a hotly debated citizen initiative on the fall ballot that would deny illegal aliens most government services...

*****************

Thereafter the Republican wing-nuts divorced. Turns out Michael was the worst kind of active bisexual, one with no prospects of winning prestigious public office. Arianna walks away from the marriage with many millions of dollars but as an embarrassment to movement conservatives - what with her baggage relating to undocumented workers and "teh gay" - the core Republican issues...

So she decides she'll become a one woman dynamo and rally the Independents - those who are too good for either party or too uninterested in politics to have an opinion. Arianna undertakes several causes. My favorite, she advocates for doing away with what is wrecking our politics. Arianna calls for the banning of... wait for it...polling. That's right, the vile Clintons were always looking at polls therefore if polls were banned no more politicians like the Clintons.

Well her one woman band didn't go over very well. What to do? She had to find a group of suckers. She conveniently realizes that her good friend Newt Gingrich isn't committed to helping the poor after all.

Ariannna Huffington decides she'll become the Grand Duchess of Limousine Liberals and wannnabe Limousine Liberals. She's lived happily ever since.

*Of course, she's forgiven Al Gore for his short comings and past associations - she's a long time leader on green issues...these days anyway.

Angel Of Mercy said...

"...a Port-O-Let after a marathon laxative-based-chili-eating-contest..." LAXITIVE-BASED CHILI?!? As if it doesn't work well enough on its own?? You have lost your ever-loving mind! And you absolutely you MUST stop doing that when I'm trying to consume a bit of liquid refreshment.

Mr. Glass, you are a never-ending fount of exquisite outrage and deliciously quotable literary nuggets. This is a continuing thank you...

Anonymous said...

Speaking of laxative-based chili...

Here's John Stossel in a hot tub.

With a plastic penis.

http://sfist.com/2008/04/29/photo_du_jour_1_13.php

Anonymous said...

First, The Chili Runs (Angel of Mercy and Joe Max) ...

"...a Port-O-Let after a marathon laxative-based-chili-eating-contest.." LAXITIVE-BASED CHILI?!?

You folks need to check the Chile Festival in Madrid, NM depicted in the biker film, Wild Hogs. (Where else can one see Tim Allen, Wm H Macy, John Travolta, Martin Lawrence, Ray Liotta AND Peter Fonda ... in one testosterone-laden froth film?)

More important to this conversation: Teh Chile does have that purgative effect.

Film Bonus: You get to watch a Rural Metrosexual sing at the country fair. Also very purgative.

Second, Re: Arianna Showing on the John Streussel-on-a-Shingle Show ...

I'm with you, Driftglass. What in Sam Hill is Huffington doing pandering on those shows? There are so many other Pander Venues that don't involve going down on Ayn Rand.

And have you noticed how many right-wing-nut fucktards have been showing up on Jon Stewart's The Daily Show??? (Newt the Puke Gingrich this week!!!)

Jon Stewart is no John Streussel-on-a-Shingle. But I think the Media Managing Velociraptors of the RNC are leaning on Viacom (owners of Comedy Central) and other Lefty Lords of the Cable TV to get their disease vectors on the toob.

So, I dunno either why Arianna Huffington is even bothering hawking her book on the BS programs. It smells desperate. It is desperate.

My three dollars and 23 cents.

darkblack said...

'Where have you gone, Doctor Death?...A nation needs to be Stosselized anew'

;>)

Unconventional Conventionist said...

I'm sure porn stars everywhere are scandalized by that moustache comment.

Anonymous said...

i smell spam.

and when am i gonna get the christmas gift i've been asking santa for these past eight years - john stossel, dennis miller and michael medved tied in a burlap sack with rabid polecats and thrown into the atlantic ocean?

Imaginista said...

"...there is also no doubt that Stossel was just as full of shit as a Port-O-Let after a marathon laxative-based-chili-eating-contest."

Pure gold. You HAD to have as much fun writing that as we did reading it.

Anonymous said...

Out here, at our elitist festivals:

http://www.strawberrymusic.com/home.asp

We elitist's don't call them Porta Lets.

They is PortaPotties.

Or, Blue Rooms.

Dang them unwashed dirty ignorant masses.

*G*

Anonymous said...

Stossel came to my town a few years ago to do a story on the local council regulating pedi-cabs after they had a few accidents.

He told so many obvious lies and distortions about the situation that even the local rightards who invited him realized he was full of shite.

Mister Roboto said...

Joe Max's link hyperlinked:

O-o-oh my eyes, I'm blind, {AAAAIIIIEEEE}!

larue's link hyerplinked"

Some stuff about this years's Strawberry Music Festival.

I generally operate under the assumption that in this day and age of hyperlinks, if I don't have a working hyperlink for people to click on, people won't look at what I'm trying to show them. Once again, a refresher course, just use <> brackets where I use [] brackets in my example:

[a href="http://icanhascheezburger.com/"]Oh, look! Pretty kitties![/a]

will get you this when you use the proper brackets:

Oh, look! Pretty kitties!

So I wonder what happened in the early 90's that made workplace fatalities take such a sudden and dramatic dip and remain at that low level? I'll bet Eebil Gummint had something to do with it!

Mister Roboto said...

Oh, an interesting factlet about the pic of Stossel that heads up this post. You'll notice that a sign on the podium at which Stossel is speaking says "Young America's Foundation". Those of you who know a thing or two about recent political history probably recognize the acronym YAF as being the same as "Young American's for Freedom", a conservative activist group so rabidly reactionary that the Southern Poverty Law Center has labelled them a "hate group" and that earned the nickname "Young Americans for Fascism" back in the late 60's/ early 70's. According to SourceWatch.org, the two organizations are pretty much the same thing. Young America's Foundation is essentially a tax-exempt front-group for Young Americans for Freedom.

Unknown said...

You know, I don't think it was the private sector that beat Hitler. I think that was a fairly large government program. I guess Stossel thinks beating Hitler was probably a bad idea, then.

I bet he likes satelite broadcasting of all his ABC schlock, though. All that space shit is pretty gumminty. We didn't get to the moon and develop satelites and whatnot using the awesome power of Ayn Rand's ass.

Mister Roboto said...

Oopsie, some unwanted characters were somehow added to joe max's transcribed link. Here's the real deal:

Warning: Put on a pair of very dark sunglasses before clicking this link!

Anonymous said...

A Stossel Streudel? I think that's when a guy j$*&$ on another guy's mustache, before letting the goat @#@## his ^&^&$$ while tasing his 0@!!s

A Stossel Struessel is more or less the same, just uses cinnamon and an extra table spoon of butter (or lard, it helps with the goat).

Anonymous said...

ps - the links I put in are safer than Love and Lights :-))

dang dood, tha's naaaasty! but then you did give a fair warning. Now I gotta go wash my eyes.. (googles: Jessica, Alba, boobies)

Mister Roboto said...

Now I gotta go wash my eyes..

/me hands skunqesh a seltzer bottle filled with pure bleach

Anonymous said...

Holy shit you people are stupid.