Rooting against America...and reason

After 8 years of W., Zombie Republicans are tired of cheering U-S-A

Remember when, under President Dubya, Republicans accused Democrats of rooting against America?  As if our psychic energy made all the difference.

Well, now Republicans are clearly rooting against America. One blogger at the conservative American Spectator wrote, "I'm just too angry at the [BLS jobs] report" to write about it.  That's right.  Angry.  At a report. That ostensibly shows good news.  And he's not alone.  

Pickled old One Percenter and ex-CEO of GE, Jack Welch, immediately tweeted that Obama was fixing the data, Chicago-style, (whatever that means), and he refused to take back his accusation when given the chance.  And of course Tea Party favorite, Rep. Allen "Non-Negotiable" West, wasn't buying the report for a second either. It was also no surprise that Rush Limbaugh accused the "Obama regime" of manipulating the BLS data.

Things got absurd with MSNBC's Joe Scarborough & Co. "scratching their heads" over the report, and debating whether the latest unemployment figure shouldn't actually be 8.1 percent instead of 7.8 percent.  Imagine! Debating on live TV a difference of 0.3 percent in the unemployment figures!  Is this what we've come to, folks?  

Finally, there was conspiracy theory nutjobbery. One writer at the conservative Washington Examiner theorized that thousands of unemployed Democrats who were surveyed by the Census Bureau simply lied about being unemployed.  You know, to help Obama.  And something called The Washington Free Beacon did some amazing investigative journalism and uncovered the smoking gun that "at least two" economists at the BLS have donated money to Democrats over the last three elections, although one of them, uh, left the Bureau in July.

This gamut of paranoia to outright disbelief to mild skepticism among Republicans is kind of funny, considering what happened 12 months ago. Cast your mind back. It's a crisp October morning. And Glenn Thrush at Politico, within 45 minutes of the BLS releasing lower than expected jobless numbers, said he "received no fewer than eight GOP press releases blasting away at President Obama for failing to stem the tide of unemployment."

Labor Secretary Hilda Solis pointed out to CNN on Friday: "This is a methodology that's been used for decades. And it is insulting when you hear people just cavalierly say that somehow we're manipulating numbers."

So Republicans have faithfully believed the jobs data based on the exact same methodology up until now, and they have reminded us constantly how bad things were, and when things got a little bit better, suddenly they stopped trusting the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics.  What rank, self-serving hypocrisy!  That's what they get for fixating on one statistic for three years. Now I predict that they'll start saying the unemployment figure doesn't matter, that the economy is still in the pits, or they're not very high-paying jobs anyway, and so on and so forth.

A few reasonable Republicans and all economists agree that there's nothing fraudulent going on here.  

For a very technical explanation of September's labor participation and unemployment data, see this.

Besides rooting against America, against economic growth and jobs, because it hurts their party's electoral chances, Republicans are once again aligning themselves with kooks, and petulantly setting up camp outside the civilized boundaries of the "reality-based community."