Think Progress takes Mitt Romney to task for misrepresenting the facts . I’m taking Think Progress to task for not being able to read a simple bar graph.
I’m not going to say I think this graph is clearly labeled but if you actually take the time to read it rather than just looking at the pretty colors, you can see that the red bars represent jobs lost during recessionary periods while the adjacent blue bars represent jobs gained or lost in the 24 months immediately following them.
At issue is the 2007-2009 time period, with Think Progress claiming that Romney is attributing the job losses to the “Obama Recovery.” In order to believe that to be true, one would have to (a) not have read the legend; (b) believe that the years from 2007 through 2009 are labeled as both a recession and a recovery; (c) be stupid beyond belief; or (d) all of the above.
When I was a child, we would have learned to read a graph like this before we left elementary school. Just sayin’…
Update 1: The new “Big Brother” arm of the Obama campaign, Attack Watch, picked up this scurrilous attack-that’s-not-an-attack and ran with it. They say Romney has “a flawed understanding of the facts.” Apparently, no one working for the Obama campaign can read a bar graph either. No wonder the economy is in trouble.
