Here’s an excellent example at political game-playing versus a journalist who got fed up with being lied to. Mark Haines of CNBC got into a scrap with a guy named Hans Bader, a counsel to the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a think tank opposed to corporate regulation.

Bader was coming on the air to try for the umpteenth time to resuscitate the old “Jones Act” non-fiasco, claiming that the Obama administration has been sucking up to unions by refusing to waive the Jones Act, which prohibits foreign-flag vessels from taking part in port-to-port trade between U.S. ports. The claim has been that Obama has sacrificed the environment to help the unions–as if the right wing really gave a crap about the environment. What they really want is to (a) break down union standing, and (b) bash Obama with something, anything that they feel can stain him.

Bader claimed that there were a number of cases where the Jones Act prohibited foreign vessels from assisting the clean-up in the gulf, and gave two examples. The first was the Dutch offer, which Bader used to say was the “Irish need not apply” standard which theoretically scared off scores of other offers which were, as a result, never made, or so Bader claimed.

Haines blew that claim to pieces the next day, having researched it and found that the Dutch offer was made in anticipation of a leak being found, but the offer was turned down because the leak had not been found yet, nor its scope understood. Yes, the administration took too long to anticipate the scope, and yes, the EPA’s strict regulations (the Dutch equipment wasn’t good enough to meet normal standards, but would have been far better than not using anything at all) stood inanely in the way of using of the Dutch equipment for several days. But after the scope of the emergency was understood, the Obama administration returned to the Dutch and accepted the offer. The Dutch equipment is now in use–and the Jones Act was never an issue in this case.

As such, it could never act to discourage foreign assistance. Nor was it widely publicized or well-known before just now, and so would not have acted as a deterrent anyway, thus demolishing Bader’s secondary point that there are countless imaginary offers that would have been made had not Obama so thoroughly discouraged them.

The second example Bader brought up was a vague mention of a “foreign deck barge” that was reported in the publication Human Events–a right-wing publication. No details are given of which country offered it, what use it could be, or anything else. I have found no corroboration of this claim anywhere, and so like the Dutch report, if this is not completely fabricated or taken wholly out of context, it is likely irrelevant–for example, in that same report, the explanation was given that the deck barge’s purpose was served by a U.S. deck barge and therefore was not needed. If true, then there is no purpose for the Jones Act to be waived in such a case–unless the right wing now favors using foreign equipment while US equipment lays idle. In any case, the right-wing complaint about the Jones Act does not even apply.

Bader published a defense of his case, but danced around the fact that he was simply wrong. He excused himself in the case of the Dutch offer simply because he found it reported in the Voice of America, as if he could not be held responsible for checking his facts. Nor does he provide any corroboration for the second example beyond a vague report in a clearly biased magazine. He even used his tiredness to somehow excuse the case he made, or how he made it. But none of that can defend the fact that he was dead wrong.

Bader even quoted the text of the Jones Act to suggest that it can be used to prevent foreign offers of help–and yet completely ignores the text in the Jones Act which clearly exempts cases of assistance in oil spills!!

Haines is clearly a bit too upset–but if my job was to hear lying talking heads spout this crap every day, I’d be likely to fly off the handle now and then myself. Haines does make a flub, claiming that Bader could not name one–he did, and although it was later proved false, Haines did not know that for certain. Also, I think Haines went a bit over the top calling Bader “Senator McCarthy”–but again, in light of the fact that he knew he was being lied to, and considering the manner of the lie, I can’t fault him much for that.