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Last week, many conservatives on this site and around the interwebs gleefully chimed in on another "Obama scandal" -- this time, a New York Post column, based on an anonymous source and the confirmed chicanery of Census worker Julius Buckmon (story can be found here), alleged that the Census bureau cooked the jobs numbers in the run-up to the 2012 election, presumably to grease the skids for Obama's re-election.
Turns out that Exhibit A in columnist John Cruedele's expose on chicanery at Census was ... well, calling it bull**** would be an insult to actual bull****.
A bogus NY Post piece sets off a frenzy : Columbia Journalism Review
But, of course, none of this matters. The right wing has jumped to conclusions without any facts (AGAIN), and now it's part of the right-wing zeitgeist that Obama ****ed around with the jobs numbers before the election.
Turns out that Exhibit A in columnist John Cruedele's expose on chicanery at Census was ... well, calling it bull**** would be an insult to actual bull****.
A bogus NY Post piece sets off a frenzy : Columbia Journalism Review
The problem here is not that there’s no story, but that Crudele seriously overplays and distorts what he’s really got, turning a nugget of news into a blockbuster conspiracy exposé. It’s like if Woodward and Bernstein had skipped the years of legwork and just went with “NIXON HENCHMEN BURGLE DNC” the day after the Watergate burglary.
But of course, Nixon’s henchmen did actually burgle the DNC. What Crudele has uncovered is not evidence—at all—of a political conspiracy—but a very minor story about a single Census employee filing fake household reports rather than doing the work of surveying the households.
It turns out that the single Census employee Crudele found faking reports—Julius Buckmon—hasn’t worked for the Census since 2011, when, presumably, he was fired. That news came from CNBC’s Steve Leisman, and it moots the thesis of Crudele’s entire column.
All he’s got after that is a single anonymous source saying the Census intentionally interfered with the election, and that doesn’t come close to cutting it, particularly since Crudele’s reporting in the rest of the piece is fatally flawed.
But, of course, none of this matters. The right wing has jumped to conclusions without any facts (AGAIN), and now it's part of the right-wing zeitgeist that Obama ****ed around with the jobs numbers before the election.