I find it incredible that anyone, however dim, would blame President Obama for the employment slowdown that afflicted America in May. And I think the American media are doing a rotten job of reporting the story.

For the pundits to declare that the sluggish economy will torpedo the Obama re-election campaign is not just dim witted, it is sickeningly dishonest.

Yet here is the New York Times on the subject:

The weak employment report on Friday held the potential to reshape the presidential campaign, members of both parties said, lifting Mitt Romney’s efforts to make the race all about President Obama’s handling of the economy and making it harder for Democrats to break through in their efforts to define Mr. Romney on their terms.

And how’s this from the New York Post:

 A dire US jobs report that showed unemployment up after a measly 69,000 jobs were created in May landed like a nuclear bomb yesterday on President Obama’s re-election campaign.

The TV newscasters were no better. They unanimously sounded a liturgy for the Obama campaign instead of alerting their listeners to the real cause of the nation’s economic doldrums. 

Their self-fulfilling prophesies are woefully unfair.

Surely, by now, the American electorate is aware of the deliberate Republican sabotage of the president’s job creating attempts. It’s hardly a secret that their number one objective is to defeat Barack Obama, and they have made no attempt to hide their sabotage. Yet the pundits pretend that Obama will automatically get the blame for a bad jobs report.

By assuming that America’s voters will reject the president because of the country’s economic problems, the media are implicitly suggesting that they should.

You would expect Mitt Romney and John Boehner to do that. It’s the key play in the Republicans’ game plan.

But the media?

The media know better. They know that  Republicans in both the House and Senate have repeatedly sabotaged the president’s initiatives to revive the economy and create jobs. They know that Republican legislatures across the land have slashed government payrolls, adding hundreds of thousands to the unemployment total. Indeed, the media know that this is how the Republicans hope to defeat the president.

And the media should know, too, that the financial and corporate community, which overwhelmingly supports the Republican agenda, is deliberately making things worse by tightening their purse strings. With uninvested billions and pared down payrolls, the corporations are choking off the cash flow that is the economy’s lifeblood. Meanwhile, the banks are doing their part by withholding credit for small businesses. 

By pretending they don’t know what’s really happening, the media are complicit in the Republicans’ sabotage.

But I don’t think the voters will be so easily duped. The Republican strategy of sabotage is too obvious. And it has inflicted too much misery on too many Americans.

I have enough faith in the American people to predict they will take the May jobs report in stride, and vote pretty much as they would have voted before the figures were publicized.

As for Mitt Romney, it is inconceivable that anything he says will influence anyone’s vote. Nobody trusts Mitt Romney, not even Republicans. Everybody (even the family dog?)  knows he is a hoax.

And, on this occasion, so are the prophets of doom that infest the media.

Click here for an exception to the media hysteria.