7.8%

By Mustang Bobby

The September jobs report came out on Friday, and it looked pretty good:

The nation's unemployment rate dropped below 8 percent in September to its lowest rate since the month President Obama took office, the Labor Department said Friday.

While employers added only a modest 114,000 jobs last month, the jobless rate declined to 7.8 percent from 8.1 percent, even though more people entered the labor force.  Adding to the positive news, job gains were revised upward by 40,000 for July (to 181,000) and by 46,000 for August (to 142,000), which had been considered a disappointing month, casting a slightly rosier hue on the summer slowdown.

The private sector, which has been adding jobs since March 2010, grew by 104,000 workers in September. Governments, where cuts have been a drag on the recovery, added 10,000 jobs.

And of course the immediate reaction from the Republicans and the low-information section (which is redundant) was apoplectic:

The economy added 114,000 jobs in September and unemployment declined to 7.8 percent. Not great numbers, but paired with major upward revisions to previous monthly reports and taken in the context of a slowly recovering economy, the report was viewed as good news for America.

Unless, of course, you were hoping for bad news. And apparently quite a few of President Obama's critics were — so much so that they suggested the Bureau of Labor Statistics was part of a vast conspiracy.

The leader of the "job truther" movement: former GE CEO Jack Welch.

"Unbelievable jobs numbers..these Chicago guys will do anything..can’t debate so change numbers," he said on Twitter.

He had some friends in Congress too. Rep. Allen West (R-FL) tweeted "I agree with former GE CEO Jack Welch, Chicago style politics is at work here." He added on Facebook that the jobs report was "Orwellian to say the least and representative of Saul Alinsky tactics from the book 'Rules for Radicals.'"

FOX News' Stuart Varney apparently sensed where his audience was going. Within minutes of their release he told viewers that "there is widespread mistrust of this report and these numbers."

"How convenient the rate drops below 8% [for the] first time in 43 months, five weeks before the election," he added later.

Okay, let's let a little logic prevail. (Yeah, I know that's a fool's errand when you're talking about dealing with frothing freaks, but what the hell...)

First, if the Obama administration was cooking the books at the BLS to make them look good for the election, why did they wait until now? Why didn't they start messing with them back in May when they started to look crappy, or through the rest of the summer? It's not like this is some Aaron Sorkin script where the president comes in in the last five minutes and roasts his opponent just so the audience would keep watching past the last commercial. (Ezra Klein explains it all for you.)

Second, all the months that the unemployment numbers have been stubbornly north of 8%, all the Republicans and Romney folks have been pointing to the BLS numbers as gospel, proof that Obama's economic policies and stimulus efforts were an abject failure. The BLS has been the Absolute Proof.  Now they're all a sham? Nuh-uh. Or, as Steve Benen put it, "you're clearly an intellectually lazy hack. No serious person can credibly argue this way."

There is a bit of karma here; the better unemployment numbers story is going to step all over the bad debate performance by Obama and throw a split-finger fastball at the Romney campaign, which is already swinging in the dirt at the news: "This is not what a real recovery looks like." Oh yeah, like you'd know, Mr. $5 Trillion Tax Cut Bullshitter.

If the Republicans were real patriots, they would be cheering the good news about the economy and the fact that things are getting better. Rooting for bad economic news just for political gain is despicable. And utterly predictable from these clowns.

(Cross-posted at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)