INTRODUCTION: Since his election as RNC Chairman, Michael Steele has been under fire for his frequent gaffes and incompetence.  Steele recently said in an op-ed in Politico that the special election in NY-20 was a referendum on President Obama's agenda.  The goal of this study was to quantify the prevalence of Utter Bullshit in Steele's words.

METHODS: A thorough review of the paragraphs and sentences in Steele's 4/1/09 op-ed in Politico was conducted.  Word counts were performed using Microsoft Word.  Bolded words were defined as wrong, and underlined words were defined as misleading.  Words with regular font were defined as correct.  Utter Bullshit was defined as the composite total of wrong and misleading words.

RESULTS: Steele's op-ed contained N = 852 words.  427 words (50.1%) were designated as wrong, and 306 words (35.9%) were designated as misleading, yielding an overall Utter Bullshit Score of 86%.

CONCLUSION: I ♥ Michael Steele.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: The author would like to thank the TPM Cafe community for permitting him the forum with which to conduct this analysis; and of course, Michael Steele.

AN INVESTIGATION OF THE PREVALENCE OF THE UTTER BULLSHIT OF MICHAEL STEELE.
By SuperBowlXX

The present study has reproduced the entirety of Michael Steele's op-ed, originally found here.  The author estimates that 86% of Michael Steele's words in the editorial are Utter Bullshit; non-Utter Bullshit words include simple words like "the" and "and."  Similar findings on Rush Limbaugh's use of Utter Bullshit words were demonstrated by the author previously.  The results of the present study strongly indicate a substantial increase from normal levels in the prevalence of Steele's Utter Bullshit on April Fools Day (p < 0.001).  The authors hypothesize that this was not a coincidence, but rather it was "all part of Steele's plan, baby."  Please see the Appendix for further descriptions of the formulas used to calculate the Utter Bullshit Ratios.

Table 1:

Tuesday's special election in New York's 20th Congressional District was closely watched, and rightly so. The election represented the first opportunity for voters to give Democrats a progress report on President Barack Obama's economic recovery policies and, judging by the results, voters don't like the "change," let alone the taxing, spending and borrowing, that's coming from Washington.

Total Words = 57
Correct Words = 3 (5.3%)
Misleading Words = 12 (21.1%)
Wrong Words = 42 (73.7%)
Utter Bullshit Ratio = 18.0

The NY-20 race was actually not the first opportunity for voters to give President Obama a progress report.  Running polls of President Obama's approval rating have been running for quite some time, as far back as January.  In addition, judging by the results of NY-20, the Democratic candidate Scott Murphy had more votes by the end of the night than Republican opponent Jim Tedisco, pending the outcome of absentee and military ballots.  That Murphy leads the vote count in a race where the Republicans spent more money than did the Democrats, particularly in a district which has 70,000 more registered Republicans, shows that Steele is both wrong and dishonest in Table 1.

Table 2:

Make no mistake -- we believe Jim Tedisco will win once all the absentee and military ballots are counted. And let's be clear, this is not a recount.

At least 4 percent of the votes have yet to be counted in the first place. Tedisco's victory will be a credible repudiation of the spending spree that Obama and Congress have been on since January. Even the executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee acknowledged over the weekend that the race was "a referendum on the Economic Recovery Act and Barack Obama's policies."

Total Words = 92
Correct Words = 18 (19.6%)
Misleading Words = 25 (27.2%)
Wrong Words = 49 (53.3%)
Utter Bullshit Ratio = 4.1

Steele and the GOP certainly do believe Jim Tedisco will win after all ballots are counted, and it is yet too early to determine if he is wrong here.  However, the sentence "And let's be clear, this is not a recount" has been labeled as misleading for the following reasons: 1) "Let's be clear" is a bastardized version of President Obama's frequent argument modifier "Let me be clear" -- evidence suggesting that Steele is in fact jealous of Obama -- and 2) the NY-20 race is not a recount YET.  Republicans simply haven't gotten around to overturning the results, despite their threats to do same before the ballots were closed (not to mention the GOP's hypocrisy re: recounts in recent elections).  So while this statement is not incorrect per se, it still falls under the broad category of Utter Bullshit.

Furthermore, all precincts have reported in NY-20.  Steele is misleading the reader by leaving out the detail of absentee and military ballots, of which there are currently 5,907 out of 155,000 votes cast (~3.9%).  The bolded statement in Table 2 is both astoundingly wrong and stupid because the race in NY-20 yielded, for now, the opposite result from what might have been expected several weeks ago, when Tedisco was way ahead in the polls in a solidly conservative district.  The fact that voters went to the polls and helped Murphy climb all the way back into the race, with a potential victory, potentially explains the exact opposite of what Steele is claiming.

Plus, the sentence "a referendum on the Economic Recovery Act and Barack Obama's policies" was not uttered at all by the DCCC executive director, Brian Wolff.  Typing the phrase into Google, with quotation marks, produced one hit -- specifically, Michael Steele's own editorial.  Actually, Wolff did say this on March 11: "The stimulus package and the economy, and our candidate, are striking a tone with voters in the 20th District."  Wolff's statement was in response to Tedisco, who said that he would have voted No on the stimulus with the rest of the Party of No, despite the fact that most Americans support it.

Table 3:

Well, the DCCC is right -- this likely Republican victory is a referendum on the president. Democrats sent mailers out to voters linking their candidate to the president, and the Obama campaign team used its much-vaunted e-mail list to rally its troops in support of Scott Murphy. Obama himself made a high-profile endorsement of Murphy in the closing days of the race, Vice President Joe Biden cut a radio ad and a robocall for Murphy, and the Democratic Party ran an ad in the closing days featuring the president himself.

Total Words = 89
Correct Words = 5 (5.6%)
Misleading Words = 74 (83.1%)
Wrong Words = 10 (11.2%)
Utter Bullshit Ratio = 16.8

The underlined statement in Table 3 is not technically wrong -- President Obama and Vice President Biden did write e-mails and cut ads in support of Murphy in the heat of a close race.  However, the statement is misleading because Steele is implying that support for a Democratic candidate by the White House would mean a rejection by the voters of the President if Murphy should lose -- but not a rejection of Republican policies if Murphy should win.  The Utter Bullshit about the concept of NY-20 being a referendum on anything cuts both ways, but unfortunately Mr. Steele wants to have it both ways.  One might recall that a giant smackdown of Republican policies did take place on November 4, 2008, and the current polls on the approval of Congressional Republicans still seem to reflect this sweeping rejection of the GOP.  The approval ratings of both Democrats and Republicans are not likely to move that significantly as a result of this race.

Table 4:

Well, the voters have spoken, and while the results are still pending, Republicans are confident that the final vote tallies will show those voters have rejected the president's approach. This will be true even in this Democratic-leaning district that candidate Obama carried in the presidential election and the previous Democratic candidate for Congress carried with more than 60 percent of the vote.

Total Words = 62
Correct Words = 0 (0%)
Misleading Words = 24 (38.7%)
Wrong Words = 38 (61.3%)
Utter Bullshit Ratio = Undefined

See the explanation for Table 3 about the abject bullshittery on the referendum talking point.  The district is not Democratic-leaning, as stated previously, and Republicans didn't sound very confident about the NY-20 results, as per House minority leader John Boehner's words on voting day.  The underlined statement is for the most part true, but it is considered misleading for assuming that a district that Obama won and went more than 60% for the Democratic candidate in November is somehow offering a wholesale rejection of the President because the NY-20 race was a toss-up (see Figure 1).

Figure 1:

Table 5:

Look at it this way: Does any student of politics think that this race would have been competitive if it had been held last November? Answer -- no. The ground has shifted, and is shifting, as the voters become increasingly worried about Obamanomics.

And who can blame them?

Total Words = 47
Correct Words = 5 (10.6%)
Misleading Words = 27 (57.4%)
Wrong Words = 15 (31.9%)
Utter Bullshit Ratio = 8.4

While the author of the present study is a student of politics, he is also a student of epidemiology.  And one of the more important lessons that an epidemiologist will teach his or her students is the idea of the counterfactual conditional -- that you can take Population X, expose it to drug Y, and measure the rate of disease following the exposure, but you cannot then measure the rate of disease in Population X as though it were never exposed to the drug, because they were already exposed a priori.  In other words, you don't live in a parallel universe -- well, most of us don't, but Michael Steele seems to be doing that just fine, because he somehow knows that Murphy would have beaten Tedisco by a lot more in November than he did in March.

Steele's Utter Bullshit logic, of course, is puzzling.  Yes, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand did win her race in NY-20 in November by a wide margin, but she was a popular Representative in upstate New York and an incumbent.  An outsider candidate with no public office experience like Murphy would not necessarily have been favored in November against a 26-year veteran of New York political office like Jim Tedisco since the Republicans had a built-in registration advantage over Democrats, and a big one at that.  Utter Bullshit applies to this statement because Steele is apparently living in his own world, and he still thinks that the outcome of the NY-20 race was a rejection of President Obama when the simple reality is that only a month ago, Tedisco would have mopped the floor with Murphy.

As for the question "Who can blame them?", Steele is deliberately misleading the reader by suggesting that voters are now turning en masse against Obama and his agenda.  Hardcore Republicans certainly are, according to the latest polls -- but most Americans are on board (for the moment), and most Americans aren't actively hoping for the President to fail (nor are they apologizing to Rush Limbaugh for suggesting that Rush is entertainer who spouts ugly and incendiary bullshit).  So when Steele asks, "Who can blame them?"  The author answers, "I do.  I blame them for buying into discredited right wing talking points and Utter Bullshit."

Table 6:

As the Democratic Party's candidate for president, Obama pledged he would be a responsible steward of the taxpayers' money, saying, "I want to go line by line through every item in the federal budget and eliminate programs that don't work and make sure that those that do work, work better and cheaper."

That was then. Today, a mere two months into his administration, Obama and congressional Democrats have demonstrated that their only solution to the current economic crisis is to spend, tax and borrow. The Democrats' reckless approach will leave our children and grandchildren with a staggering national debt owed to China and oil-rich countries in the Middle East.

Total Words = 109
Correct Words = 23 (21.1%)
Misleading Words = 32 (29.4%)
Wrong Words = 54 (49.5%)
Utter Bullshit Ratio = 3.7

The Utter Bullshit-a-thon continues.  President Obama did say the quotation above, as Steele claims, during the second debate with John McCain.  Of course, Steele is ignoring the fact that many of his party's own brethren railed against earmarks in the stimulus, yet still tried to take credit for the earmarks that made it into the final bill.  Steele wades further into an Utter Bullshit storm by criticizing Obama's "reckless" approach to fixing the economy when Obama's predecessor did quite a few reckless things himself.  You know, like getting the U.S. into a war in an oil-rich country in the Middle East, exploding the national debt, and turning a budget surplus from 2000 into a huge budget deficit, all while slashing taxes for the wealthiest and creating the worst economic collapse since 1929.  This ain't Obama's recession, Steele.

Table 7:

First came the president's $787 billion economic stimulus package. Not only did the version congressional Democrats passed and he signed into law contain billions of dollars in pork-barrel spending -- spending Obama pledged to weed out as a candidate for president; it offered families little hope by way of direct job creation at a time when unemployment rates are at historic levels. It also contained the loophole allowing millions of dollars in bonuses to be distributed to executives at American International Group, which, because of mismanagement, had already been bailed out by the taxpayers.

Total Words = 93
Correct Words = 9 (9.7%)
Misleading Words = 52 (55.9%)
Wrong Words = 32 (34.4%)
Utter Bullshit Ratio = 9.3

Oh noes!  Not the awful PORK spending!  We wouldn't want THAT around to do anything reasonable like volcano monitoring, would we (see Figure 2)?

Sarcasm aside, Steele is still serving up a hefty plate of Utter Bullshit here.  First of all, McCain was the earmark warrior.  Obama was pretty clear when he said, repeatedly, that eliminating $18 billion worth of earmarks won't do a whole lot to settle the problems of the economy.  Nor will a complete five-year spending freeze, as Steele's colleagues have so kindly proposed.  Second of all, Steele then goes on to criticize the stimulus because he doesn't think it will create jobs, but of course, Steele also thinks that government never created a single job anyway.  Third, it might surprise Steele to know that the American public overwhelmingly doesn't blame Obama for the stuff that AIG pulled -- yet that didn't stop Steele from dropping yet another brick of Utter Bullshit into Politico's servers.

Figure 2:

Table 8:

Then came the president's jaw-dropping $3.6 trillion budget proposal that some members of his own party couldn't fully support. His budget came on the heels of $787 billion in economic stimulus spending, $410 billion in spending on a fiscal year 2009 omnibus package that contained 8,000 earmarks and billions of dollars in spending for corporate bailouts. It will raise taxes on the very job-producing small businesses our economy needs right now. And it will leave a $9 trillion debt hanging over the heads of our children and grandchildren.

Total Words = 88
Correct Words = 13 (14.8%)
Misleading Words = 36 (40.9%)
Wrong Words = 39 (44.3%)
Utter Bullshit Ratio = 5.8

True, some blue dog Democrats have voiced their concerns about the President's budget.  But what's so jaw-dropping about returning to the marginal tax rates that were in use during the Clinton years?  That the rich may have to pay a little more in.....(gulp).....TAXES???  Besides, the voters still favor the President's agenda over that of the Republicans on health care, taxes, energy, the deficit,....oh and the budget plan too.  But I guess we're still a center-right country, right Steele?

As for the national debt, Steele is riding his way into Utter Bullshit town by lamenting the possibility of a $9 trillion debt should Obama's budget be signed into law.  Not that the prospect of a rising national debt is a humorous topic, but isn't it funny how Steele never seemed all that worried about the national debt doubling under George Bush?  Steele seemed rather busy encouraging America to drill, baby, drill.  Also, according to CBS, the national debt stood at $9.8 trillion in September, before Obama took office.  The author of this study doesn't consider himself a math expert, necessarily, but isn't the $9 trillion debt that Steele envisions LESS than a $9.8 trillion debt?  I can't figure that one out.  Oh well, let's move on.

Table 9:

Tuesday's close election shows that voters are not comfortable with Obama's prescription for our economy's current ills, and his exorbitant spending proposals are a pill that is simply too tough to swallow.

Total Words = 32
Correct Words = 0 (0%)
Misleading Words = 0 (0%)
Wrong Words = 32 (100%)
Utter Bullshit Ratio = Undefined

See the explanations for Utter Bullshit in Tables 2, 3, 4, and 6.

Table 10:

Republicans have a different approach, one that spends much more wisely on priorities that will improve our economy and help families. One that lowers taxes and will create much-needed jobs. One that abides by the same fiscal responsibilities that millions of American families follow and won't spend money that we don't have today with the hope that it can be repaid decades from now.

Total Words = 64
Correct Words = 5 (7.8%)
Misleading Words = 0 (0%)
Wrong Words = 59 (92.2%)
Utter Bullshit Ratio = 11.8

The only patently true, non-bullshit words in Table 10 are the first five.  Republicans DO have a different approach to fixing the economy compared to Obama, and it's in a nice li'l booklet that has graphs and everything (see Figure 3)!

Figure 3:

Table 11:

The fact that Democrats did not sail to victory in yesterday's special election in New York should be seen as a wake-up call to Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. Voters want our economy to improve and want their elected officials to make it a priority, but they haven't given the White House and Congress a blank check. America's elected officials need to find solutions, but they must be fiscally responsible ones. We simply can't spend our way to economic recovery.

Total Words = 80
Correct Words = 35 (43.8%)
Misleading Words = 16 (20.0%)
Wrong Words = 29 (36.3%)
Utter Bullshit Ratio = 1.3

Voters are watching. They have seen how congressional Democrats have simply rubber-stamped Obama's spending proposals. Tuesday's election was a vote of "no confidence" in the Democrats' tax, spend and borrow approach.

Total Words = 31
Correct Words = 3 (9.7%)
Misleading Words = 0 (0%)
Wrong Words = 28 (90.3%)
Utter Bullshit Ratio = 9.3

Steele out-bullshitted himself by first mentioning in Table 8 how some Democrats objected to President Obama's budget -- but then he backtracks by saying that Democrats just rubber-stamp everything the President wants!  Did Steele forget his party's own rubber-stamped, unanimous DONUT they handed the President when voting on the stimulus bill?  Steele then calls the NY-20 race a "vote of no confidence" in the Democrats, even though the Democratic candidate got more votes than the Republican (not counting absentees).  Ah well, who are we to expect reason and logic about how voting and winning elections work from a guy who got beaten the last time he ran against a Democrat, who lied about which party he belonged to in order to mislead voters (see Figure 4), and who bussed in homeless people for his GOTV efforts?

Figure 4:

Finally, Steele caps off his stupendous Utter Bullshittery with this gem in Table 13:

I hope Obama and congressional Democrats are listening.

Total Words = 8
Correct Words = 0 (0%)
Misleading Words = 8 (0%)
Wrong Words = 0 (0%)
Utter Bullshit Ratio = Undefined

Do you really want us to be listening to you, Steele?  I call bullshit on that too, because every time you say or write words, both bullshit and hilarity ensue.  The author of this study concludes that Steele should be hoping Democrats are NOT listening to him, because we're both listening and laughing our asses off.

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FINAL RESULTS:

Total Words = 852
Correct Words = 119 (14.0%)
Misleading Words = 306 (35.9%)
Wrong Words = 427 (50.1%)
Utter Bullshit Ratio = 6.2
Adjusted Utter Bullshit Ratio = 7.3

In conclusion, we have investigated the level of Utter Bullshit from Michael Steele and have determined that 86% of the words contained in his Politico editorial are characterized by false, misleading, wrong, stupid, and Utter Bullshit information.  The author would like to caution that 86% may be a conservative estimate, as it does not take into account other factors like this:

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APPENDIX

The Utter Bullshit Ratio (UBR) for each Table (block of text) represents the ratio of Utter Bullshit (wrong and misleading words) to correct words.  The Crude UBR, therefore, represents the UBR for the whole editorial.  The UBR was calculated using the following formula:

UBR = (Wrong + Misleading)/Correct

The Adjusted Utter Bullshit Ratio (AUBR) represents the ratio of Utter Bullshit to correct words in each of the 13 Tables (blocks of text).  As each block contains a specific percentage of text for the whole editorial, the Tables are weighted differently to calculate an adjusted ratio.  The AUBR was calculated using the following formula:

AUBR = a1x1 + a2x2 + ... + a13x13

where a1, a2, ... , a13 represent the "weights" of each Table - the proportion of the total words in each Table with respect to the total number of words for the whole editorial - and x1, x2, ... , x13 represent the UBRs of each Table.  Adjustment caused Michael Steele's Utter Bullshit Ratio to increase by 17.7%.  NOTE: The AUBR formula excludes Tables 4, 9, and 13, where the crude UBR could not be defined because the # of correct, non-bullshit words = 0.

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Cross-posted at Daily Kos