Epic Ham Boehner Boner Fail

Steve Benen runs down yesterday's Drudge Ultimate Porkulus Special on the menu, but as usual the only thing the wingers end up with is egg on their faces.

Drudge, running with contracts from the government's stimulus website, claimed that the Obama administration had spent, among other things, $1.19 million on two pounds of ham. Some conservative bloggers, following Drudge's lead, ran with the story. House Minority Leader John Boehner's (R-Ohio) office complained about the "pork" in the stimulus. Republicans sent "blast e-mails of screenshots from the Drudge Report, highlighting the contracts as wasteful spending."

By yesterday afternoon, the Department of Agriculture felt compelled to issue a statement, explaining how terribly wrong conservatives are about this.

Through the Recovery Act, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has made $100 million available to the states for The Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP), which acquires food that is distributed to local organizations that assist the needy -- including food banks, food pantries, and soup kitchens.

The Recovery Act funds referenced in press reports allowed states to purchase ham, cheese and dairy products for these food banks, soup kitchens and food pantries that provide assistance to people who otherwise do not have access to food. This program will help reduce hunger of those hardest hit by the current economic recession.

The references to "2 pound frozen ham sliced" are to the sizes of the packaging. Press reports suggesting that the Recovery Act spent $1.191 million to buy "2 pounds of ham" are wrong. In fact, the contract in question purchased 760,000 pounds of ham for $1.191 million, at a cost of approximately $1.50 per pound. In terms of the dairy purchase referenced, USDA's Farm Service Agency (FSA) purchased 837,936 pounds of mozzarella cheese and 4,039,200 pounds of processed cheese. The canned pork purchase was 8,424,000 pounds at a cost of $16,784,000, or approximately $1.99 per pound.

While the principal purpose of these expenditures is to provide food to those hardest hit by these tough times, the purchases also provide a modest economic benefit of benefiting Americans working at food retailers, manufacturers and transportation companies as well as the farmers and ranchers who produce our food supply.

In other words, the conservative activists who pounced on this were thoroughly confused about every relevant detail, including the underlying claim.

In other words, not having to be as nice as Mr. Benen here, Wingers fail at math nearly as badly as they fail at fact-checking, accepting the truth, dealing with reality, critical thinking skills, humor, and being, you know, correct about anything.

It's a larger problem. We get Drudge or El Rushbo or any of the other adults in the Pretty Hate Machine saying something unsourced and/or completely misinterpreted, then the Wingers jump on it like it's gospel (as the Sadly, No! guys would say, "Address my [blank] , Libs!") and then 90% of them ignore it ever happened when the truth comes out. About 10% do feel bad enough to put up a correction/retraction post, but those are just rare enough to prove the point. The rest of them either again ignore the point, or keep using the smear even after being debunked. It will get to the point where you will see the million dollar ham meme back on one of the Sunday Shows, or out of the mouths of Jim DeMint/Michele Bachmann/Mike Pence, or in a Karl Rove WSJ op-ed piece, months after this debunking came out, and it will come out challenged or unchallenged, but it will come out.

And we'll go through it again. Immortal Zombie Lies. I swear if we could harness this power for good, we could have a perpetual source of energy. Watch to see where the million-dollar ham lie strikes next.

I'm betting we'll see it again before or during budget negotiations this fall, hence into the Future Stupidity predictions pile it goes.

Oh yes, and EPIC FAIL.