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" The gang at Media Matters has done a great job demonstrating how a faked-up Fox News &amp;quot;Special Report&amp;quot; on the food stamp program, starring a surfer straight from Moocher Central Casting, is having real-world consequences for the millions of people who depend on the SNAP program to eat everyday.  As Keith alluded, Fox News has been making a concerted effort to turn their special into political action. Politico reported on September 4 that copies of the special were &amp;quot;distributed by Fox staff to House members&amp;quot; ahead of the SNAP debate. &amp;quot;POLITICO inquiries to Fox News regarding the videos have gone unanswered since Saturday. But both Republican and Democratic offices confirmed that copies have been dropped off unsolicited in recent days, and the broadcast has already provided colorful fodder in promoting the Cantor package.&amp;quot; GOP leaders seized on the Fox special. According to Roll Call, Greenslate played a starring role in a memo sent around by the House Republican leadership laying out SNAP talking points: The surfer, unnamed in a memo Cantor circulated to GOP lawmakers earlier this month, is Jason Greenslate, 29. A Fox News report in August highlighted Greenslate, an unemployed musician perpetually in a cap and sunglasses, buying lobster rolls with $200-a-month benefits and laughing at the idea of a 9-to-5 job. Conservative bloggers quickly cited Greenslate as a prime example of a flawed government program. But Democrats will counter that Greenslate is atypical of SNAP recipients, and they are expected to highlight more sympathetic beneficiaries.  Which, of course, will not work, because to the various ideological omadhauns pushing this ensemble act of cruelty, nobody deserves government benefits which, in turn, do not deserve to exist, except for oil subsidies, farm subsidies, and the tax-break billionnaires get for their luxury suites at football games. While the Wurlitzer cranks out these tunes more efficiently these days, it&amp;#039;s important to remember that this technique in conservative vandalism has been around for a while. During the Clinton years, the House, under then-Speaker N. Leroy Gingrich, Definer of civilization&amp;#039;s rules and Leader (perhaps) of the civilizing forces, took the same kind of whack at the SSI program using a similar combination of bullshit anecdotes and shoddy journalism. I caught the tail end of this con in a story for the magazine.  Indeed, after Porter leaves center stage, the rest of the Post&amp;#039;s story is a judicious account of the growth in SSI spending since the Zebley decision. But the story lent to Porter the credibility of an embattled whistle-blower, and the backlash against the SSI program accelerated. On the day it appeared, two Wisconsin Democrats--Senator Herb Kohl and Representative Gerald Kleczka--cited it in a &amp;quot;Dear Colleague&amp;quot; letter that demanded an examination of the SSI program. At a town meeting, Newt Gingrich denounced the phenomenon of &amp;quot;crazy checks.&amp;quot; In May, The Boston Globe wrote a story about the program that cited both Porter and the Arkansas State study, a perfect parlay of dubious sources.  On October 13, with the congressional elections approaching fast, ABC&amp;#039;s PrimeTime Live aired an examination of the SSI program. Whereas Stein had found Woodward&amp;#039;s work disappointing, he found ABC&amp;#039;s appalling. The segment was called &amp;quot;Crazy Checks.&amp;quot; It featured correspondent Chris Wallace tramping around Arkansas, grilling indigent families about benefits they barely understood. &amp;quot;Act crazy and you can get a check of more than $400 a month from the government,&amp;quot; said Wallace. The Arkansas State study was cited, its data once again dramatized well beyond any claim its authors had ever made for it. (Neither Wallace nor PrimeTime Live anchor Diane Sawyer nor any ABC News spokesperson replied to phone messages or to registered letters asking for comment on this story.) ...And up arose Nora Cooke Porter again, to claim--without offering any support -- that fewer than 30 percent of the children receiving SSI benefits really deserved them, which meant that more than six hundred thousand children were cheating, a wildly improbable estimate that Wallace did not see fit to challenge. Instead, he told his audience, &amp;quot;If Porter&amp;#039;s estimates are anywhere near accurate, then SSI ... has become a massive, taxpayer-funded scam.&amp;quot; Jonathan Stein looked deeply into this &amp;quot;if&amp;quot;--a weaselly word beginning a duplicitous sentence that was already on its way to becoming a dishonest paragraph. He saw the future in that single word. He saw it almost as an active player, hazy and indistinct, an accessory before the fact.  And this is what is really goddamn dangerous about what my man Chuck Todd said the other day. (Chuck&amp;#039;s feeling a bit put upon these days. Tough.) According to Chuck&amp;#039;s notion of what his job is, when conservative politicians latch onto a phony Fox News story in order to make policy, it is the job of the Democrats -- or, perhaps, of the SNAP recipients themselves, who have, as we know, virtually unlimited access to the airwaves -- to correct the arrant bullshit. Or, when politicians of both parties latch onto a phony &amp;quot;scandal&amp;quot; in the SSI program, it is the job of the embattled people running the program -- or, perhaps, of Marcus Stephens&amp;#039;s parents, both of whom were, of course, important newspaper columnists of the day -- to get out the truth. Chuck&amp;#039;s just the messenger. Thus does the oligarchy tell stories to itself. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a19515/how-the-manure-gets-spread/>