A couple weeks ago, Jed Lewison
hypothesized that perhaps South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley was on crack, due to her wildly inaccurate claim that 50 percent of job applicants at a nuclear site had failed drug tests. Haley was using that claim to push for drug testing as a requirement to collect unemployment benefits. The leetle tiny problem with Haley's story was that it was, as previously mentioned, wildly inaccurate: In fact, only people being hired for jobs at the site were drug tested, and of them, less than 1 percent failed. Hence the crack hypothesis.
Now, Haley has admitted her error. Sort of:
Haley said in an interview with The Associated Press that she's learned a lesson and is going to be more careful.
"I've never felt like I had to back up what people tell me. You assume that you're given good information," Haley said. "And now I'm learning through you guys that I have to be careful before I say something."
Haley said she'd probably repeated "a million times" the story that about the test failures before being questioned about the assertions after a Lexington Rotary Club on Sept. 8.
Most people don't become governors before learning that you don't just repeat any obviously made-up story someone tells you, but at least she's capable of learning. However, while she is going to be more careful about what she repeats, she's apparently not planning to be any more careful about the justification for the policies she proposes. Because although the story she was using to sell the policy of drug testing as a requirement for unemployment benefits was complete fiction, Haley still supports the policy.
Florida has already passed a bill requiring drug testing for welfare recipients, with dramatic results—dramatic as in that only 2 percent of welfare recipients failed the drug test and now Florida owes more than $28,000 a month in reimbursements to people who passed the tests.
So Haley continues to press for drug testing of unemployed people despite the fact that both the bill after which Haley's proposal is modeled and the story she used to sell it have been thoroughly discredited. Which means that the "Nikki Haley is on crack" theory has yet to be discredited.
