Eric Bolling and the Fox & Friends hosts put on their tinfoil hats this morning as they sniffed around for the evil Obama re-election plot they felt certain was lurking behind the just-released jobless numbers.
A Fox News Alert announced that the jobless numbers rose to 439,000, when the estimate had been 375,000. Brian Kilmeade set the tone early by saying, “Wow! Are you kidding? …Oh, my goodness!”
Steve Doocy gave the tinfoil signal by saying to Bolling, “You have been suspicious of the numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics before.“
Bolling paused dramatically, before saying, “Alright, let me try not to get myself into too much trouble. This is the first week after the election.”
“That’s the first thing everyone’s gonna think about,” Gretchen Carlson said supportively.
Bolling continued, “Does anyone find it odd that the weeks leading into the election – (jobless numbers) going down, the number went towards 350, and now the first week after, first full week after 439?”
Kilmeade added, “Everyone finds it odd. I appreciate your parsing your words.”
Actually, not everyone finds it odd. In a report full of facts and devoid of inflammatory speculation, Reuters noted the devastating impact of Hurricane Sandy on the economic statistics.
“Stepping back from the storm distortions, the economy is growing at about 2 percent,” said Ryan Sweet, senior economist at Moody’s Analytics in West Chester, Pa. “We will likely see a step back in job growth” because of the storm, he added. “The economy is just muddling along.”
… The economic impact of the storm is likely to be temporary. …Economists say the storm could shave as much as half a percentage point from economic growth in the last three months of the year, but should be made up early next year.
But without offering any rebuttal to the expert analysis or providing any grounds for concluding something sinister was afoot, Bolling continued suggesting Obama had somehow cooked the numbers during his re-election campaign to make the economy look better than it really is:
I’m saying there’s going to be an explanation… They blame weather for employment numbers, they blame weather for jobless claims numbers, they’ve blamed weather for retail sales numbers. Something is going to come out here because that doesn’t make sense. That number’s just blaring, saying, “Hello, hello! Something’s wrong with this number!” Unless it’s catch up. You know, if it’s catch up, I have a real problem. That means that the numbers that were looking so good over the last few weeks were caught up today. We’ll do a little more digging.
In other words, none of them had a single piece of evidence to back up their conspiracy theory.
