The GOP’s Big Lie on Obama and jobs [View all]

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/the-gops-big-lie-on-obama-and-jobs/2012/01/06/gIQAT5HzeP_blog.html

Posted at 10:36 AM ET, 01/06/2012
The GOP’s Big Lie on Obama and jobs
By Greg Sargent

In the wake of today’s better-than-expected jobs report, Newt Gingrich has now released a statement bashing Obama for failing on the economy. He did this by echoing Mitt Romney’s favorite Big Lie — i.e., that the way to evaluate the success or failure of Obama’s jobs policies is to look at how many net jobs have been created or lost since he took office:

“Three full years into the Obama presidency, and there are still 1.7 million fewer Americans going to work today than there were on Obama’s Inauguration Day. snip

But they reach this conclusion by factoring in the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of jobs that the free-falling economy continued to shed in the months that passed after Obama took office but before his stimulus took effect. Indeed Gingrich is quite explicit about this, defining his metric as a comparison between how many Americans are going to work today versus how many went to work at the time of Obama’s inauguration.

Though today’s numbers are cause for cautious optimism, there’s no denying that jobs have not been created as fast as we would like on Obama’s watch. But come on — the citation of jobs lost before Obama’s policies passed as evidence that those policies were a failure is just ludicrously, cosmically absurd, and should not be allowed to stand.