BUSTED!!! Jim Hoft posts another deliberately misleading chart!

Yes, kids, it’s time once again to play “Just How Dishonest IS Jim Hoft?”

Hoft, the unrelentingly mendacious numbskull who posts as ‘Gateway Pundit’, has posted the following chart to illustrate another deceptive, misleading screed about how the economy is doing under Bush as compared to the Clinton years:

Two questions come immediately to mind:

1. What’s with the funky scale on the vertical axis?
2. Why a bar graph?

A commenter named bvw immediately caught out Jimmy doing his dishonest little chart dance:

That is one extremely dishonest graphic. It makes it look like the Bush years have half the reported unemployment of the Clinton years. How does it do so? Because the scale is so narrow. There’s no reason for such a tiny range EXCEPT to distort the message of the actual numbers. The actual numbers are just about equal. The reported numbers are SLIGHTLY less during the Bush years.

Exactly. Jimmy the Weasel manipulated the Y-axis to give the visual impression that unemployment was three times as great under Clinton as it was under Bush. In fact, the average for the Bush years is less than the average under Clinton by just two one-hundredths of one percent. Jimmy the Weasel chose to scale the Y-axis as he did in a deliberate and cynical attempt to hide that fact.

Jimmy, of course, lacks the maturity to take responsibility for his own actions. He actually has the chutzpah to try and blame his computer for the deliberate attempt to mislead his readers:

bvw- Write Microsoft. It is their default chart created in Excel.

Uh huh. And did the dog eat your homework when you were little, weasel boy? Microsoft Excel is a tool, and Jimmy the Weasel chose to use it to deceive his readers.

As for why he used a bar graph: Simple. Jimmy the Weasel wants to hide what happened during the Clinton and Bush terms. From the raw unemployment data, we can chart the month-by-month change in the unemployment numbers:

This plots the US monthly unemployment rate from January 1989 (the start of the Presidency of George H. W. Bush) through April of 2008. From this chart one can gain a little historical perspective, something Jimmy the Weasel would never provide his readers.

What’s the unemployment rate doing during the term of Bush I? Pretty much climbing the whole time. In January of 1993, when Clinton took office, the unemployment rate stood at 7.3%. After Clinton took office, the rate fell and continued falling. Note carefully: The eight-year average rate under Clinton is high because Clinton inherited a high unemployment rate from Bush I.

And what happened after Clinton took office? Well, the line graph shows a steady downward trend. In January 2001, when Bush II entered the White House, the unemployment rate was 4.2%. Since then, the rate has taken a bit of a roller-coaster ride — but for much of the last seven years, the unemployment rate has trended upwards under the inspired economic leadership of President Chimpy McFlightsuit. It has never come close to the low unemployment rates achieved during the two Clinton terms (as low as 3.8%).

You will learn none of this from Jimmy ‘the Weasel’ Hoft. His graph is deliberately and cynically constructed to conceal the historical facts from his readers.

This is standard operating procedure for Jimmy ‘the Weasel’ Hoft. His lies have been documented before, and there can be no doubt that he will continue to post lies and distortions. That’s what he does.

POSTSCRIPT: Whoops! In another post, Jimmy the Weasel claims that “Record low unemployment rates offers new challenges to military recruiters”. What evidence does he cite for this claim that the US is experiencing “record low unemployment rates”? Just his own distortion of economic history.

As we have seen, there have been no instances of “record low unemployment rates” during the time that George W. Bush has been President.

Keep lying, weasel boy! Maybe someday you’ll actually get good at it!