Lamestream Media Jughead Commissars Lament "Unexpected" Economic Bad News

Barry Obungler's "unexpectedly" long honeymoon with the Mainstream Lamestream collection of Managing Editors and other specimens of so-called "journalism" might soon become aware of a statute of limitations on expectations:

As megablogger Glenn Reynolds, aka Instapundit, has noted with amusement, the word "unexpectedly" or variants thereon keep cropping up in mainstream media stories about the economy.

"New U.S. claims for unemployment benefits unexpectedly climbed," reported CNBC.com May 25.

"Personal consumption fell," Business Insider reported the same day, "when it was expected to rise."

"Durable goods declined 3.6 percent last month," Reuters reported May 25, "worse than economists' expectations."

"Previously owned home sales unexpectedly fall," headlined Bloomberg News May 19.

"U.S. home construction fell unexpectedly in April," wrote the Wall Street Journal May 18.

Those examples are all from the last two weeks. Reynolds has been linking to similar items since October 2009.

Mainstream media may finally be catching up. "The latest economic numbers have not been good," David Leonhardt wrote in the May 26 New York Times. "Another report showed that economic growth at the start of the year was no faster than the Commerce Department initially reported -- 'a real surprise,' said Ian Shepherdson of High Frequency Economics."

Of course, the throats of the DNC trusted cadre like Pinch Sulzberger and a guy named Keller at the NYT are practically bottomless, but less disingenuous [or is it just plain dishonest?] media outlets are beginning to see that the light at the end of the recession tunnel may be on a locomotive speeding towards us at high speed:

Mainstream media may finally be catching up. "The latest economic numbers have not been good," David Leonhardt wrote in the May 26 New York Times. "Another report showed that economic growth at the start of the year was no faster than the Commerce Department initially reported -- 'a real surprise,' said Ian Shepherdson of High Frequency Economics."

Which raises some questions. As Instapundit reader Gordon Stewart, quoted by Reynolds on May 17, put it, "How many times in a row can something happen unexpectedly before the experts start to, you know, expect it? At some point, shouldn't they be required to state the foundation for their expectations?"

One answer is that many in the mainstream media have been cheerleading for Barack Obama. They and he both naturally hope for a strong economic recovery. After all, Obama can't keep blaming the economic doldrums on George W. Bush forever.

Who wouldda thunkit?!? Cheerleading for a president who wants to play Robin Hood eluding the High Sheriffs of fiscal probity and monetary sanity?!?

Obama's first Council of Economics Advisers chairman, Christina Romer, whose scholarly work is widely respected, famously predicted that the February 2009 stimulus package would hold unemployment below 8 percent. She undoubtedly believed that at the time; she is too smart to have made a prediction whose failure to come true would prove politically embarrassing.

But unemployment zoomed to 10 percent instead and is still at 9 percent. Political pundits sympathetic to the administration have been speculating whether the president can win re-election if it stays above the 8 percent mark it was never supposed to reach.

Administration economists are now making the point that it takes longer to recover from a recession caused by a financial crisis than from a recession that occurs in the more or less ordinary operation of the business cycle. There's some basis in history for this claim.

But it comes a little late in the game. Obama and his policymakers told the country that we would recover from the deep recession by vastly increasing government spending and borrowing. We did that with the stimulus package, with the budget passed in 2009 back when congressional Democrats actually voted on budgets, and with the vast increases scheduled to come (despite the administration's gaming of the Congressional Budget Office scoring process) from Obamacare.

All of this has inspired something like a hiring strike among entrepreneurs and small-business owners. Employers aren't creating any more jobs than they were during the darkest days of the recession; unemployment has dropped slowly because they just aren't laying off as many employees as they did then.

In the meantime, many potential job seekers have left the labor market. If they re-enter and look for jobs, the unemployment rate will stay steady or ebb only slowly.

We tend to hire presidents who we think can foresee the future effect of their policies. No one does so perfectly. But if the best sympathetic observers can say about the results is that they are "unexpected," voters may decide someone else can do better.

The fact that the Demonrat Party is trying desperately to dumb down the dialogue on the economy, or rather avoid it altogether by resorting to class warfare cliches right out of the Paris Commune, shows that there'll be no change there for the seemingly endless patience of Michael Barone.

We're coming up on two and a half years of "unexpected" delays in recovery and the Administration keeps switching excuses or fingerpointing at GWB. Even if we acknowledge that about 25% of the US population is now so far sunk into moral turpitude or indefference to the common good, how long are the presumably cogent majority of the American people going to allow this tomfoolery and outright BS to continue?

As the Republican state legislatures make sure the massive vote frauds of the early 21st century are unable to be replicated, the Dems inability to get convicted felons and other yellow-dog Demonrats into polling booths in November 2012 without any voter ID will hopefully keep the RICO activities of the DNC to a minimum of effectiveness.