Sen. John McCain, the sore loser of 2008, the oracle of the Sunday morning talk shows, is sidling up to the right-wing
conspiracy theory of the day: that the Obama administration somehow engineered a
drop in the unemployment rate:
.@SenJohnMcCain: "Frankly I am not enough of an economist to question those numbers. I wouldn't put anything past ths administration."
— @CNBCnow via HootSuite
"I can't question those numbers on factual grounds, so I'm going to question them on purely political grounds."
Oh, wait. That's not just John McCain. That's the entire Republican Party. From Karl Rove claiming to have "the math" proving that Republicans would hold the House and Senate in 2006, to Sen. Jon Kyl's "not intended to be a factual statement" lie that abortion is "well over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does" (it's 3 percent) to Sen. Orrin Hatch raising him on that statement, going to a claim of 95 percent, to Paul Ryan claiming "we haven't run the numbers" or "It would take me too long to go through all of the math" on the Romney-Ryan budget and tax plans, to, well, virtually everything Mitt Romney said in Wednesday's debate, the Republican relationship with numbers and the truth is profoundly messed up.
If they're not making up numbers, they're denying that numbers provided by independent federal agencies or nonpartisan think tanks are real. When it's time to offer their numbers, they don't have time or haven't done the math, but when someone else takes the time to do the math and figure things out, they insist that's not true, according to their own secret math. Or screw even pretending to know anything about the math or how it's done, they just "wouldn't put anything past this administration."
This isn't just a single senator buying into a ridiculous, desperate conspiracy theory. It's the way his party thinks. And right now, we're in a battle to weaken the hold that mindset has on our government. We need to Upgrade the Senate so that John McCain and Jon Kyl's disregard for the truth will be met by strong progressives like Elizabeth Warren and Sherrod Brown ready to fight the lies.
We need senators whose statements are intended to be factual. Please give $3 to our Upgrade the Senate candidates.
11:44 AM PT (Kaili Joy Gray): Of course:
Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) was not referring to doctoring unemployment numbers Friday when he told CNBC "I wouldn't put anything past this administration," according to a spokesperson. [...]
"He was taking about the WARN Act and Libya," McCain spokesperson Brian Rogers told TPM. "And so when he said 'I wouldn't put anything past the administration,' he was not referring to the BLS numbers."