[link|http://www.townhall.com/columnists/robertnovak/rn20020808.shtml|Rejecting bourgeois notions of arithmetic]

Excerpts:

Through all of President Clinton's last two years in office, the announced level of before-tax profits was at least 10 percent too high -- a discrepancy rising close to 30 percent during the last presidential campaign. Most startling, the Commerce Department in 2000 showed the economy on an upswing through most of the election year while in fact it was declining.

Although a political motive for Democratic cooking of the government's books is there, nobody -- including Bush administration officials -- alleges specific wrongdoing. Nor is there any evidence. Estimation in 2000 was conducted by career public servants who are doing the same jobs today (working under a highly political Democrat in the Commerce Department). Nevertheless, such discrepancy in earnings statements by corporate executives today would warrant a congressional subpoena...

The result: headlines in 2000 spewing false information of corporate profits growing at 25 percent, bolstering the stock market and holding up the state of the economy as the election approached. That is the underpinning for the Democratic myth that a growing and vibrant American economy has been sabotaged by President Bush's tax cut ("We lost the opportunity for long-term economic growth," says House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt).

If the government's books were not purposely cooked in the same way as corporate accounts, there still remains the question of how the government could be so wrong. The Bureau of Economic Analysis may well be free of partisan tilt, but its incompetence can cast a long political shadow.

I say:

What's the economy, stupid?

There's a lot of incompetence in the world. But there's also a lot of fraud. And whenever a fraud begins to be uncovered, the apologists generally try to pass it off as some sort of innocent - albeit strangely convenient - mistake. I'll believe this was simple incompetence the day that the bank makes an error in my favor. This sort of thing gives incompetence a bad name.

Maybe the Gore crowd isn't so much steamed that Bush stole the election as that Gore didn't quite succeed in stealing it.