Tragi-comic dispatch from the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank, wherein Phillip Swagel, Assistant Secretary of Treasury for Economic Policy stutters, sputters and mutters his way through an anxiety-riddled yet curiously half-hearted attempt to spin the latest economy numbers. Milbank dryly reports that 16,000 jobs were lost last quarter and speculates that many of them must have been journalism jobs, judging by the shockingly sparse attendance. It’s all fun and game until you realize that the economic fortunes of 300 million Americans are in the hands of men like this — straw men so easily blown over by the first strong wind of bad news. They have all the peripheral vision of a submarine captain. This is the problem with the blind faith of Bushniks: they never see anything coming. The collapse of the housing market, the collapse of the investment market, the collapse of the environment, Katrina, 9/11, Iraq, Afghanistan. My, my, my, the Lord works in mysterious ways, don’t He?
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