Conservatives Can't Count

Submitted by Rick Perlstein on November 26, 2007 - 3:09pm.

Counting is important: anyone who grew up watching Sesame Street knows that. Our friends in the Bush administration must have missed that part of the lesson. They hate to count. Especially when the results might make them look bad.

Some of Paul Krugman's most eye-opening columns in his collection The Great Unraveling—they're in section two, entitled "Fuzzy Math"—concern the way, once Bush became president, the government stopped counting certain things, or changed the methods of tabulation in order to score public relations points.