More than 60 prominent scientists, including 20 Nobel prize winners and 19 winners of the National Medal of Science, denounced the Bush Administration for its systematic distortion of scientific facts for political gain; John H. Marburger III, the administration’s head of science and technology policy, dismissed the report and said that it was politically motivated. President Bush’s Council of Economic Advisors decided to move the official start date of the last recession from the generally accepted March 2001 to the fourth quarter of 2000, when Bill Clinton was still president. Health and Human Services officials admitted that a report on racial and ethnic disparities in health care was altered to make it seem more upbeat. “There was a mistake made,” said Secretary Tommy Thompson. The Bush Administration began to back away from its predictions that the national economy, which has lost 2.5 million jobs since Bush took office, would add 2.6 million jobs this year. It was noted, not for the first time, that George W. Bush could be the first president since Herbert Hoover to end a term with fewer American jobs than when he started, and the president’s chief economic advisor suggested that fast-food jobs might need to be reclassified.
A whole of fact cooking going on there . . . . the thing I dislike most about this (other than the fact it’s all true) is the link to Hoover: it’s a shame that a great humanitarian who did so much to repair the damage of the Great War is only remembered for the Depression, as if it was his fault.