Oliver Willis Can’t Read A Chart… He’s Not Alone.

Posted by in Blog on September 6, 2011 4:32 pm / 9 comments

Mitt Romney’s campaign unveiled his economic plan today. Naturally, the Left’s professional smear merchants went through it looking for something to attack.

Oliver Willis appears to be the first to send up a batsignal pointing out what he labels “Mitt Romney’s Amazingly Deceptive Chart.” Here it is:

Where’s the deception, you ask? There is none, of course. Oliver simply doesn’t know how to read it.

Anyone with half a brain can plainly see that the chart shows how many jobs were lost during the selected recession and how many jobs were added in the 24 months following the recession. It doesn’t take much to understand the chart. Why? Because the chart has this thing called a “Key” or “Legend” which tells you what the chart is saying. Simple.

The color red, as the key states, tells you how many jobs were lost during the recessions which are clearly labeled at the bottom. For example, during the 2007-2009 recession, 8.9 million jobs were lost. The color blue, as the key states, tells you how many jobs were added in the 24 months following the end of the recession. Sticking with the same example, that means in the 24 months following the 2007-2009 recession, -800,000 jobs were added or -.8 Million jobs (that’s a loss).

Oliver, the self-proclaimed “Kryptonite to Stupid”, took to Twitter to tell everyone about his discovery. I’m sure most people who saw his tweet looked at the chart and said to themselves, “Um. Where’s the deception?” But it seems there are a number of other people who either can’t read or just took Oliver’s word for it.

Those people include: Markos Moulitsas, Dave Weigel, Greg Sargent, Steve Benen, David Badash, and a host of others like the interns who run the ThinkProgress twitter account.

Are they all idiots? Or did they just make the mistake of believing that Oliver Willis can read a chart? Place your bets on whether any of these people will bother to correct themselves after realizing they were taken for fools by Mr. Kryptonite to Stupid.

 
 

9 Comments

  1. Largebill says:
    September 6, 2011 at 5:14 pm

    Must be bizarro kryptonite which just increases the level of stupidity.

  2. Mustango says:
    September 6, 2011 at 5:42 pm

    I think Oliver’s basic problem is that his job description effectively reads: “React first, actually think it through later (maybe).”

    That said, that’s not a well-made chart. The “Obama Recovery” label is misplaced: it should be clear that it only refers to the last blue bar, not both bars that it is centered over. In fact, why are the red bars even there? They’re entirely beside the point being made and just distract.

    The chart should ditch the red bars and relabel the blue bars at the bottom with the beginning and end dates of the 24-month recovery periods. Granted, that would deprive us of the amusement of seeing Oliver make a fool of himself yet again, but I’d rather communicate in a way even he would be hard pressed to misunderstand.

  3. thegreatbobo says:
    September 6, 2011 at 8:11 pm

    Maybe if Romney included the following column Oliver Willis would’ve had a better chance of understanding it.

    Double
    Dip
    Recession
    |______^______|
    2009-2012

  4. Mitt Romney beclowns the Netroots on job growth. | Pirate Scroll says:
    September 6, 2011 at 11:00 pm

    [...] that their lubber-god has so abjectly failed them, therefore, agents o' Media Matters and Daily Kos have been trying t' pretend that Romney was claiming that Obama was in office in 2007 (with a manic, if not hysteric, subtext [...]

  5. Mitt Romney beclowns the Netroots on job growth. says:
    September 7, 2011 at 1:54 am

    [...] that their man-god has so abjectly failed them, therefore, agents of Media Matters and Daily Kos have been trying to pretend that Romney was claiming that Obama was in office in 2007 (with a manic, if not hysteric, subtext [...]

  6. The Obama Job Growth « The MFP Report By Mike Pasqua says:
    September 7, 2011 at 3:16 am

    [...] that their man-god has so abjectly failed them, therefore, agents of Media Matters and Daily Kos have been trying to pretend that Romney was claiming that Obama was in office in 2007 (with a manic, if not hysteric, subtext [...]

  7. Sean_for_3 says:
    September 7, 2011 at 11:01 am

    BWAHAHAHAHAAAAAAA! The generator for stupid strikes again!

  8. AttackWatch.com… Laughingstock in less than 24 hours | The Right Sphere says:
    September 14, 2011 at 12:44 pm

    [...] of the first items the website chose to address was a chart in Mitt Romney’s economic plan which I discussed previously. They, like Oliver Willis and ThinkProgress, clearly can’t read a chart. Credibility? [...]

  9. Nick says:
    September 15, 2011 at 12:02 am

    The chart is is no way a lie, but it is deceptive. While, like you said, anyone with “half a brain” can read it and see what it means, the problem is the number of people who do not use that half of a brain.

    As the chart is, you see “Obama’s Recovery” right above the 2007-2009 section which means at first glance it appears that those bars (most dramatic of which are the the jobs lost) are all due to Obama’s recovery efforts. That part is not true. All that is misleading is the placement of “Obama’s Recovery”

    Either way Oliver Willis IS an idiot and the chart is technically correct.

    Both sides twist things and both sides are full of idiots.

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