Deal’s Raw
Deal With Numbers
Let’s get this part out of the way first…
I am not a fan of Georgia’s current governor.
My dislike of him goes way back when he was a member of Congress. Although Nathan Deal got in as a so-called “Blue
Dog Democrat”, he decided to jump ship to the GOP right after winning
re-election. And once “imbedded”, it
could be said that the system in his district was gamed so that he would
continue to get re-elected over and over… at least until “something” convinced
him to run for the governor’s mansion.
No, I did not vote for him when he ran for governor in 2010. And, no, I will in all likelihood not vote
for him this time around either. I voted
Libertarian then and I will probably vote Libertarian again.
But just because I am not a fan of the “Real Deal”, that does not mean that
I can’t criticize his recent bout of hypocrisy, especially when it concerns one
of his strongest re-election selling points.
Deal’s biggest selling point has been the economy. He’s been running
TV ads touting the fact that he gave big breaks to Big Business so they
would come to Georgia and supposedly “create jobs” during the Great Recession. And to back it up, he’s been pointing to the state’s
unemployment numbers, which were steadily declining.
But then this past week something “strange” happened. Those same unemployment numbers started
climbing again. Now, according to the
Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, Georgia
is ranked dead last in the country for unemployment.
Dead last!
Well how can that be if Georgia is supposedly the “best place in the country
to do business”, according to Deal’s own spinmasters?
Don’t worry, Governor Deal has a quick and simple explanation for that. You ready for it?
It’s all a conspiracy.
No, I’m not kidding about that.
Governor Nathan Deal actually said that the reason why the unemployment numbers
suddenly placed his state dead last in the nation was
because of a conspiracy by the Bureau of Labor Statistics to “cook the
books” in favor of Democratic governors.
So… Deal takes the credit when the BLS numbers look good for him, but,
when they don’t, he claims that it’s a “conspiracy”.
Well, wait a minute, Governor.
How do we know that these numbers are the “questionable” ones? Could it possibly be that the previous numbers
– the ones that you touted as part of your campaign – were the actual “fudged”
ones? Maybe they were designed to give
you a false sense of security and then the BLS would spring the “real” numbers
on you at the last minute to make you look bad!
Don’t forget, Governor Deal, that the BLS numbers were
being questioned by your own party going back to October of 2012! All that time you’ve been reaping the
benefits of numbers that members of your own party claimed were suspect!
Oh, but wait, I’m not done yet!
Wouldn’t it make more sense for a suspected politically-manipulated
government agency to start sabotaging your efforts while you’re in the middle
of your first term and not suddenly when you’re running for re-election? Why make things look good for you so soon
into your tenure? It would certainly
help the “other party” out tremendously to show how much of a perceived failure
you are. It would encourage better
candidates to run against you. It would
even support a greater effort to replace you in the primary so you wouldn’t be
able to run for re-election.
But that didn’t happen; did it, Governor? No, it didn’t.
Let’s get brutally honest here… Governor Deal’s tin-foil ass-hat claims
of a conspiracy are laughable at best.
They show just how ethically questionable his whole tenure has been,
which, given
the circumstances which led him to go from Congress to the governor’s
mansion in the first place, is really no stretch of the imagination.
Let’s not forget that Deal left Washington under a cloud of shame when
the Office of Congressional Ethics said that then-Congressman Deal abused his
office to benefit his own family’s businesses.
And then there’s the recent news that his head of the state’s Ethics
Committee, Holly LeBerge, was
fired after a Fulton County Superior Court judge said that she had, and I
quote, “repeatedly proven herself to be dishonest and non-transparent.”
So to claim that there is some sort of “truther” conspiracy out there
to cook the unemployment books against him is just par for the course. It’s
nothing more than the pathetic whining of a career politician who has no
business holding any kind of political position whatsoever.
Besides, this commentator has long pointed out that the unemployment
numbers are not a reliable indication of the economy to begin with. They only count the number of people who are
eligible to get and are receiving unemployment compensation. They cannot count the people who are
considered ineligible for compensation or who have exhausted their previous
claims. Those people suddenly do not
exist in the eyes of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Deal could have used this to explain the BLS statistics, but then if he
did that, it would have also disqualified him from using those same numbers
when they would benefit him. But Deal
seems to think that he can use the numbers only when they benefit him and then
disqualify them when they don’t.
The sad part is that Deal’s MARTA trip to Wingnut City really won’t help
the one person that would gain from it, namely Deal’s Democratic opponent,
Jason Carter. Carter is still too much a
political neophyte to take an opportunity like this and run with it. That leaves the voters to hold Deal to
account… and we all know just how well the great unwashed is when it comes to
this kind of stupid.
This is yet another reason why I’m not a fan of Governor Deal… because
he knows how to game the system all too well, and also how it is already gamed
for people like him.
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