Remember during the Obama administration those figures coming out of the labor stats people claiming unemployment was creeping down to below 5% levels, levels consistent with a a healthy economy? And remember how the “new jobs created” metric was emphasized, rather than the “new jobs per capita” measure which is much more realistic in a nation with a growing population.
These figures could be fairly criticized, they did not tell the whole story. There were valid questions about how the “unemployed” were defined as “those no longer looking for work”. And it did not address the fact that many of these “new jobs” were often poor quality, low-paying employment with little or no benefits. Many were even temp jobs with no long-term security.
Still, the statistic had some value because it documented the drop in unemployment after the free-fall economic catastrophe that occurred in the last years of the Bush administration. As in our discussions of polar ice, there are lots of ways you can slice the data, but its the trends that matter.
The Republicans criticized these statistics, spun them to emphasize their own POV and ideology, but they did so with some justification. Their criticism was only somewhat, but not completely, unfair. As I have always pointed out, the same data can be legitimately interpreted in different ways to support often contradictory conclusions.
Of course, during the campaign, Donald Trump went much further than that. He characterized the unemployment data as rigged and outright lies, a calculated fabrication used to justify Obama’s failing policies.
The new job figures are now out, and the declining unemployment numbers are still declining, and the long term trend seems to be continuing. These numbers tend to exhibit random superimposed fluctuation on a time scale of several months, and the new administration has been in office less than two months, so it is a bit early for the Trump administration to take credit for them. Still, we must concede, the election occurred
over four months ago, and the unemployment figures do show that the new administration has not yet torpedoed the economy. In other words, it is too early to tell yet, the jury is still out.
However, the White House has been now Trumpeting these figures, gloating about the good news. There is no more talk about how the statistical agencies are rigged and crooked, dominated by evil Democrat liars. I suppose if we got a sudden uptick in unemployment, this narrative would quickly be resurrected. For example, recent Congressional Budget Office reports warning of serious financial flaws in the GOP replacement to Obamamcare have not been received by Conservatives with the same unqualified enthusiasm as when the CBO pointed out the flaws in Obamacare.
When this inconsistency about the unemployment numbers was brought up at a recent news conference, White House mouthpiece Spicer laughingly brushed it off as a “that was then, this is now” moment. Very funny. Ha ha. He didn’t even make an effort to dispute it, or to spin it, or even to divert the question to some alleged crime from the Obama or Clinton organizations.
The question arises, why does this White House lie? And why does it lie about things like unemployment, crowd size at the inauguration, the results of a Yemen commando raid, the “millions of illegal voters” who gave Clinton the popular majority in November? These things can not only be easily fact-checked, the items referred to simply do not reflect poorly on the Trump Presidency in any way. The man lies even when he doesn’t have to. This is truly extraordinary. In fact, it is unprecedented.
It would be easy to dismiss this as just shoot-from-the-hip Twitter indiscretions that bypassed the White House filtering process, but I think it is much more than that. I am slowly starting to become convinced that this is a deliberate attempt to inoculate the public against the truth. Unlike most vaccines which attempt to strengthen the immune system, this one is designed to weaken it. The vaccine works in two ways.
First, the Deplorables must become hardened to constant opposition harping on these little, basically meaningless, lies so that they will come to automatically accept much bigger and outrageous lies which are sure to follow. In the future, any questioning of the Donald’s pronouncements will simply be dismissed as whining from “The Liberal Media”. This process is already well underway. You’ve heard the comments right here on the Zone: “give the man a chance, he just got here”, or “its just a holdover from the campaign, he’ll settle down soon enough”, or that always-useful, “all politicians lie”.
The second assault to the political immune system is a bit more subtle and insidious. It is to infect the opposition and the middle of the road with a sort of fatigue, a despair, that the lies are coming so fast and so increasingly outrageous that resisting them is pointless. We are forced to rely on the hope that sooner or later, the American system, which has shown itself as being so robust and basically healthy in the past, will eventually develop antibodies to this pestilence.
I wouldn’t count on that. Infections adapt, and they evolve, and they are contagious. Eventually, not even the death of the host organism will prevent the pestilence from spreading. It’s already taken root in pockets of Europe.