Bodybuilding Buffalo Bilkers

Ever wonder how "welfare queen" stories get started?  Over at Time's Swampland, I think we saw one get born.  Joe Klein, on the road searching for the soul of America or something, decided to uncritically and unskeptically relay a tale told to him by Mark Kirkwood, a resident of the Detroit area.

Kirkwood had a classic welfare queen story to tell:

"I was at the gym the other day, working out. This big guy next to me is really ripped, wearing bling and fancy gym clothes. I asked him about his diet. He said it was high protein. 'The really good stuff is buffalo meat,' he said. 'It costs $8 a pound, but it's high protein low fat.' I asked him how he could afford buffalo meat and said, 'I just swipe my Bridge card [apparently a form of food stamps, distributed by the state of Michigan] and it goes through.' I was really angry, but I kept it to myself. I just said, 'You're on welfare?' He said, 'I'm on disability.' I'm thinking, disability? He was lifting more than I was."

Kirkwood doesn't tell us the guy's ethnicity but you get the idea. He's a big, ripped, unemployed black dude who doesn't have a job and uses a state anti-poverty program to take the public for gourmet meat.  This story follows Kirkwood's rant about calling customer service lines that have a Spanish language option so you kind of know who we're dealing with here.

We're dealing with the kind of people who love telling stories about lazy minorities and welfare recipients ripping off hardworking taxpayers.  Joe Klein obviously knows this and he really shouldn't have retold this story without checking it out.  Which gym?  The guy you're talking about is there all the time?  I'd love to interview him.  This whole tale would collapse if Klein had done that because it likely isn't true.

See, there are a couple of problems:

First, ground buffalo costs about 25% less than is reported here.

Second (and more damning), a little much information, don't you think?  What is this guy, the gym exposition champion?  Kirkwood is so impressed by this dude's body and atheltic performance that he asks him for diet tips.  I've certainly asked the big guys at the gym for advice about diet, supplement and training and I've gotten a lot of helpful tips but there's a big difference between, "you can get a good protein supplement at GNC" and "you can get a good protein supplement at GNC, which I pay for with my debit card."  The second one is fake because nobody talks that way.  Except in Joe Klein's world, I guess, where bodybuilding gym rats start off by giving you diet tips and end by telling you how he pays for his groceries.

Klein's response to the criticism has been: 1) stop nit-picking about the price of Buffalo; 2) the story is plausible because there is fraud in almost all welfare programs and 3) you're criticizing me because you don't like the message or the guy delivering it.

Klein's message is that Democrats have to get fraud out of our social programs if they expect hardworking people like Kirkwood to support (or at least tolerate) those programs.  But I suspect that outright racist propaganda, spread around by reputable news organizations is far more damaging to our society and to the cause of economic fairness and compassion than "fraud in the system."

Another funny bit is that Joe remarks in his first post that stories like this almost always go viral.  They certainly speak to people's suspicions and frustrations with the system.  Maybe too perfectly.  Maybe that is why they should be heard with suspicion and retold skeptically, if at all.