"The truth the right can't handle"

Paul Krugman looks into the right's insta-shriek about the Bureau of Labor Statistics' having "cooked the books" when it put together the latest unemployment stats.  (See the truth about former GE CEO Jack Welch below.)

Krugman stresses two points:  1) Job numbers are prepared by professional civil servants, at an agency that currently has no political appointees.  And 2)  The methods the bureau uses are public — and anyone familiar with the data understands that they are “noisy,” that especially good (or bad) months will be reported now and then as a simple consequence of statistical randomness...

Same old same old.  As many on the right seem to find difficult to understand -- the right is itself the villain here. 

The U.S. economy is still far short of where it should be, and the job market has a long way to go before it makes up the ground lost in the Great Recession. But the employment data do suggest an economy that is slowly healing, an economy in which declining consumer debt burdens and a housing revival have finally put us on the road back to full employment.

And that’s the truth that the right can’t handle. The furor over Friday’s report revealed a political movement that is rooting for American failure, so obsessed with taking down Mr. Obama that good news for the nation’s long-suffering workers drives its members into a blind rage. It also revealed a movement that lives in an intellectual bubble, dealing with uncomfortable reality — whether that reality involves polls or economic data — not just by denying the facts, but by spinning wild conspiracy theories.

It is, quite simply, frightening to think that a movement this deranged wields so much political power. ...Paul Krugman

We haven't budged -- morally or politically -- from where we were during the Vietnam war. Still the same old America with still the same old muddled corporate-military zeitgeist -- where it is still "necessary to destroy the town to save it."  Having failed over and over again in our attempts at  dominance overseas, we are turning on ourselves.  This time we are our own victims.