Pennsylvania voters, I’m sorry to report, are not exactly listening to their Commander-in-Chief. Or if they are listening, they’re not buying the snake oil he’s selling, not when it comes to the economy.

First, the Right Honorable George W. Bush, doing what he does best (hint: it’s not telling the truth):

First of all, I — we’re not in a recession. We’re in a slowdown.

And, survey says:
By a reasonably wide margin (90% to 10% is presumably wide enough even for the Right Honorable George W.), Pennsylvania voters believe we are indeed in a recession.

Why on earth would they think so? Maybe it was because the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board Ben Bernanke (who might know a thing or two about it, as opposed to the Right Honorable, who doesn’t know much more than 2 + 2 = 4, if that) recently said that GDP “will not grow much, if at all, over the first half of 2008 and could even contract slightly”. Or maybe it was the WSJ reporting that it is “hard to find an economist who doesn’t believe the US is either in recession or so close it’s not worth arguing about”.

Or maybe Pennsylvania voters don’t pay any attention to the Right Honorable or to Bernanke or to the WSJ. Maybe they just know how to look at the visible signs of economic stagnation — maybe even in their own lives, and in their own neighborhoods — and make up their own mind, presidential spin be damned.

Maybe if Bush could stop trying to bull-sh*t the American public every time he opens his speech orifice, his disapproval rating might not have reached 69% (pardon my French), the highest level ever recorded by Gallup. “Ever recorded by Gallup” means going back to when Franklin Roosevelt was President. Which, in case history wasn’t your strongest subject in school, was about 70 years ago. There have been some fairly crappy Presidents in all that time. And now dear George stands certified for all time as the crappiest, at least in the opinion of the American people.

All anyone can say is that he brought it upon himself.