As a near-euphoric talking head has no doubt already told you, the jobs report for July registered an extremely weak increase of 32,000 jobs. Given that the expectation was growth on the order of 215,000 to 240,000 new jobs, this news is bad for American workers, bad for the Bush campaign, and great for the Kerry campaign.
But while the jobs report is certainly not going to help Bush, it does call into question the entire worldview of the segment of our population who believe “Bush knew!” about 9/11 beforehand, that he expertly manipulated intelligence to go to war in Iraq, that he is increasing terror-alert levels as a way to control the election tempo, and that he and his minions are diabolically controlling the levers of government to create a fascist state.
Because, after all, if the Bush White House can’t even get advance notice on a simple jobs report and downplay expectations, how is it possible they could so expertly control the far more complex aforementioned events?
People in D.C. were blindsided by the pathetic jobs report Friday morning. If the Bush White House is so evil and so adroit, how come they were as stunned as the rest of us?
To say that Washington, D.C., leaks like a sieve would be unfair to the water-slowing properties of sieves. Official Washington is like one large college dormitory where everyone talks to everyone else. And yet, the Bush White House was caught flat-footed Friday morning with a jobs report that was more than two Ohio State stadiums less than expected.
If the Bush team had expertly planted a mole in the jobs-report bureaucracy, does anyone even doubt for a second they would have lowered the expectations on this one? Of course they would have. They would have said this week that we’re in the temporary “rough patch” Chairman Greenspan had described, and that jobs figures may reflect that but the overall trajectory is up.
They didn’t do any of that, though, and Wall Street got spooked.
Let’s face it. If you can’t (or won’t) get “whisper numbers” on a critical jobs report and play down expectations, how exactly can you be expected to orchestrate 9/11, manipulate intelligence and terror levels, and otherwise masterfully control the levers of government in the service of a dark, power-crazed stratagem? Michael Moore, Howard Dean, and the BBC should consider this the next time they utter their paranoid fantasies.
–Robert Moran is a vice president at Republican polling firm Fabrizio, McLaughlin & Associates. He is an NRO contributor.