It has been said bad news does not get better over time.
I once knew a lady who discovered a lump in her breast, but ignored it until it had metastasized. She finally sought medical help when she reached the point that she could no longer ignore the pain.
Initially, denial gave her a brief sense of security, but all the while, the cancer was spreading.
I could not help but notice an odd similarity this week while listening to Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, D-Fla., tell MSNBC that Obama and the Democrats have “really begun to turn the economy around.”
With the exception of inside the Beltway, Americans are hurting.
Cities and towns across this great country bear the scars of recession in one form or another, from abandoned homes to emptied offices and pot-holed roads.
Last week’s stock market nose dive coupled with anemic unemployment numbers were symptomatic of a sick economy screaming for a huge dose of old-fashioned American Capitalism.
Obviously in denial (or worse) the Obama administration did everything in its power to convince Americans that “there is nothing to see here, just move along.”
It’s like watching my friend exhibit all the symptoms of cancer and all she wants to talk about is how good she feels.
And now with Standard and Poor’s downgrade of the country’s AAA credit rating, for the first time in United States history, it will be intriguing to see how the administration tries to spin this latest revelation.
While most Americans are not economists, we are smart enough to see the economy is in dire straits. The administration seems to think throwing a bunch of numbers around as a shell game is enough to quiet the masses.
Listening to White House rhetoric last week, one might be tempted to think that the creation of 117,000 jobs and the slight unemployment rate drop to 9.1 percent is a sign of an economy on the mend. Not so much.
And as Paul Harvey used to say, “Now, for the rest of the story:”
While the creation of 117,000 jobs is better than no jobs at all, our economy must create at least 125,000 jobs per month just to keep up with the pace of population growth.
Even still, we are not coming close to chipping away at the jobs deficit in this country.
Likewise, the administration championed its economic policies on news unemployment dropped from 9.2 percent to 9.1 percent, but failed to disclose that a large portion of that percentage was due to workers who gave up on the job search. The administration continues to deny the problem.
Thanks to Sigmund Freud, we know denial takes on many forms, one of which being the denial of facts, which can lead to outright lying if someone believes the truth is too painful to face.
If the Obama administration and its sidekicks continue to deny the severity of the condition of our economy, we will wake up one day to find it’s too late.
(Susan Stamper Brown’s column is syndicated by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. E-mail Susan at writestamper@gmail.com.)