Right-wingers’ hilarious excuses for the jobs report

An uptick for the country, and a time of creative thinking for the GOP

This month’s jobs numbers are out, showing the unemployment rate to have fallen to 7.8 percent, robbing Republicans of a favorite talking point. That number is a 44-month low, according to the Associated Press , which reports the unemployment number fell from 8.1 percent because “the number of people who said they were employed soared by 873,000.” Predictably, right-wing Republicans are crying foul , insisting, based on nothing, that the career civil servants at the Bureau of Labor Statistics must be cooking the books.

The report comes is very good news for President Barack Obama, coming on the heels of his lackluster debate performance Wednesday night against Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. It also puts a dent in a favorite GOP talking point that is based on a lie, one that Romney doesn’t mind repeating – that Obama purportedly promised that the stimulus would bring unemployment to below 8 percent. (That was a projection — not a promise — in a report authored by Christine Romer, then director of the the President’s Council of Economic Advisers.) Obama never made that promise , but since when did the truth matter in Romney’s campaign strategy? His is, after all, a campaign that would not be “dictated by fact-checkers,” in the words of Romney pollster Neil Newhouse.

In fact, the news is so good for Obama that a number of Republican eminences have stepped forward to say it just can’t be true. And just like the poll numbers that show Obama outpacing Romney in the swing states, they’re chalking it up to a grand conspiracy.

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