Obama causes retroactive unemployment

Well, well. An online journal which dubs itself the American Thinker has published a piece which purportedly proves that the stimulus package has caused unemployment to be worse than it would have been without the stimulus. This, the author claims, establishes the “fact” that we are experiencing the “Obama recession.”

To accomplish this piece of legerdemain, they published a graph which illustrates the unemployment figures Obama’s team projected if there were no stimulus bill, and the figures they projected if the plan went forward. (One has to accept on faith that the two graphs are, in fact, those of the administration.) Then the author(s) plot the actual unemployment stats for recent months and argue that since the jobless rate is higher than Obama’s team predicted, he must have caused it.

Uh-huh.

There are so many problems with this logic that it’s hard to know where to start, but the most glaring bit of nuttiness is that the graph shows that the steep rise in unemployment started long before Obama became the front-runner for the Democratic nomination. Therefore we must conclude that it was his candidacy which caused unemployment to climb.

My own conclusion, based on the evidence in this article, the rantings of Rush, the vile self-justification of Cheney, and all the rest, is that Obama is having a very negative effect on the mental health of right wing ideologues. He’s driving them nuts. They all clearly need medication (well, not Rush, it didn’t work out very well last time).

And the tragedy of this is that we are supposed to believe that we can have a civil debate about issues in this country, with two (or more) sides offering reasonable arguments that lead to the best outcome for all. Instead, one wing of the American experiment has gone utterly looney-tunes.

~ by bothwellsblog on June 7, 2009.