When the White House announced this month that the stimulus had saved or created at least 150,000 American jobs, and announced that additional stimulus spending could save or create an additional 600,000 jobs this summer, did you think that was based on actual data? It wasn’t, you know. The Wall Street Journal’s William McGurn pointed out that none of the official stat-keepers and bean-counters, neither the Labor Department, nor the Treasury, nor the Bureau of Labor Statistics measures "jobs saved." The New York Times explained that the President’s jobs claims are "based on macroeconomic estimates, not an actual counting of jobs."

If you have been paying any attention for the past, oh, century or so, you know what “macroeconomic estimates” are worth. It rhymes with “sprilch.”

This means that the numbers are fantasy, intended to deceive, and doing a bang-up job of it. Jobs are being lost (about 1.5 million and rising), but hey, just imagine how many more jobs would have been lost without all those jobs being “created” or “saved!” Yes, just imagine, because that’s where these “statistics” are coming from: the imaginations of Obama’s PR gang. It’s a brilliant deception, when you think of it. All the lost jobs are the fault of the Bush Administration, and all the saved jobs are Obama’s doing. Even while the economy is tanking, his policies are working like a charm. And how does one prove that the expenditures are creating and saving jobs while the number of unemployed is rising, when there’s no mechanism for identifying those jobs? One doesn’t! One just expects everyone to believe. And they do!

Now, if the United States had the vigorous, unbiased, skeptical, inquiring, tenacious press and news media that it is supposed to have, this would be a real problem for the White House PR wizards, and they’d have to actually back up their claims with some figures, or change the subject. The United States has no such news media, of course. What it mostly has is partisan, inept, badly-trained, sycophantic, hero-worshipping, trivial-minded hacks who will brave any peril to discover how Michelle Obama gets her arms so toned, but who don’t have the curiosity, intellect or professionalism to challenge the most obviously dubious claims imaginable.

But that’s another story.

Right now, the story is that the current administration is making up positive figures to support policies that have had no measurable effects, and getting away with it because it has charmed and stroked everyone out of even thinking the obvious question, which is, “Wha?”

Now that’s world class lying! Giving these people the “Liars of the Month” almost seems inadequate.