If nothing else, the paranoid right's burlesque BLS scandal demonstrated perhaps the goofiest and later the most lethal kind of enemy-fraternization imaginable. As Greg Sargent put it early yesterday afternoon:
[U]nemployment trutherism.... It’s very likely ... to break through to the nightly news, drawing still more attention to the dropping unemployment rate.
And that's precisely what happened. Yesterday morning the right took out a gun and shot itself in the foot, and then, as the day proceeded, repeatedly shot itself in the head.
After the BLS' job-numbers release, Obama-friendly analysts such as Ezra Klein and Jared Bernstein scarcely saluted either the new unemployment rate of 7.8% or the new hires of 114,000. Well, these numbers are OK, in fact they're sorta good, said the analytically unintoxicated--but they're not exceptionally good, they're nothing, really, to write home about. In short, the Obama-friendly guys, in an effort to protect their credibility and professional reputations of at least some objectivity, interpreted the numbers with a sober, and sobering, reserve.
Which is exactly the way in which any astute, anti-Obama operation would have done it.
So how did the "unemployment truthers" do it? This 7.8% thing is huge, according to the Welches and Wests and Fox News and other assorted far-right paranoids. It's stunning. There's absolutely earth-shaking news on the unemployment front. Record-breaking news. Unprecedented. Historic!
President Obama himself could not have propagandized it better.