Dumbfuckery du Jour

Today is a celebration of a reporter who apparently has a zero-tolerance policy for dumbfuckery:

Since BP’s oil gusher in the Gulf of Mexico began, a common right wing refrain has been that the Jones Act — a 1920 law stipulating that commerce between U.S. ports needs to occur on U.S. ships — has been hindering the cleanup effort by forcing the federal government to reject aid from foreign nations. Conservative lawmakers and pundits have been claiming that the Obama administration is refusing to waive the Jones Act out of deference to the will of labor unions. Earlier this month, McClatchy demolished this meme, but that hasn’t stopped the drumbeat, with Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) going so far as to say that aid from 17 countries has been rejected because of the Jones Act. Yesterday, on CNBC, Hans Bader of the Competitive Enterprise Institute repeated the talking point, but he ran into a host who had done his homework. CNBC’s Mark Haines noted that 68 different offers of foreign cleanup help have been accepted, and then challenged Bader to cite examples of the Jones Act causing a problem:

HAINES: How many rejections under the Jones Act?

BADER: I don’t know how many.

HAINES: Excuse me, Senator McCarthy, you can’t tell us how many there are? I want the facts, give us hard facts, give us evidence, not innuendo, not baseless accusations, okay? It’s offensive to intelligence. The fact is sir, you have told us there are examples of rejections and you can not name a single one.

And when supreme dumbfuck Haines offered a single example, Bader researched that example and returned to the air to tell him that he was completely full of shit.

Excuse me.  I'm going to go to a quiet room and have a nice, long celebratory cry.  Tears of joy are streaming down my face.  I can't believe a person who claims to be a reporter on teevee is actually fact-checking and calling out bullshit.  I thought actual reporters were a species so endangered that they were only occasionally found on MSNBC.  But here's one spotted in the wilds of CNBC!  Maybe there's a whole breeding population out there we weren't aware of!  Let us hope he sires a whole herd of reporters who will, without restraint, deference or shame, stare dumbfuckery in the face and call bullshit without a single trace of false balance, who believe that facts and actual reality are balance enough.

More, please!

We've got pretty weak tea for dessert, but if you want more calling bullshit, it's always nice to watch staunch conservatives tearing in to the Teabagging Twits currently busy ensuring the Republican party never has a serious thought ever again.