Sleight of Hand

It is the job of the Democrat Party (and, apparently, the hobby of many Democrat partisans and doom-mongers among the press corps) to ensure that as much power as possible ends up in the hands of Democrats at any given time. (Seriously: the only reason that any political party exists, protests about "the good of the country" notwithstanding, is to maximize their power as a group.) As such, I would expect them to do anything and say anything if it would help them in that effort, and so naturally I expect the Democrats to trash Bush as much as possible, and to slip invalid criticisms in whenever possible on the off chance they'll stick. It's redirection: ignore the reality and watch this shiny thing. But I hate it when partisans assume we're all stupid.

President Bush was saying last month that the economy had "turned the corner," but the recovery he's counting on to help drive him to re-election Nov. 2 has hit some potholes lately.

In the past few weeks, job creation has stalled, oil prices have soared to record heights, and the overall economic recovery has slowed. Groups that track poverty and health insurance data say next week's annual Census Bureau figures are likely to show more Americans in poverty and without health insurance. [emphasis added]

Those numbers are for last year. If the economy has "turned the corner" from the recession and thus is improving (which recovery the Democrat partisans in and out of the MSM have been claiming didn't exist, but now have to acknowledge in order to claim that the recovery is over), then one would assume that things were bad last year, so that there was something to improve upon.

So, either the reporter (and the organizations making these claims) are utterly pig-ignorant and dumb as rocks, or they think we are. Given the rest of this hit piece, I'm guessing they think we're stupid.

Posted by Jeff at August 29, 2004 02:22 AM | Link Cosmos