Unexpectedly!

“The economy in the U.S. unexpectedly came to a standstill in the fourth quarter as the biggest plunge in defense spending in 40 years swamped gains for consumers and businesses,” Bloomberg News “unexpectedly” reports today:

Don’t ever change Bloomberg — no really, don’t ever change. Or as the Say Anything blog noted in 2011:

This end of the blogosphere has enjoyed a delicious running joke for much of Barack Obama’s presidency…the strange appearance of the word “unexpectedly” in MSM coverage of the anemic economic recovery.  Of course, many of us knew that Dear Leader’s economic policies would either amount to nothing and/or inhibit economic growth even as they were being debated, so there was nothing unexpected about the result.  Still, the joke has only gotten funnier (sadder?) as time has worn on and it becomes clearer and clearer that the man-who-has-never-had-a-real-job-yet-occupies-the-White-House has no clue what he is doing when it comes to the economy. (For our purposes here, we ignore the not-so-outlandish notion that perhaps he knows exactly what he is doing, but that robust economic growth, if it is the result of typical laissez-faire American capitalism, is not his goal.)

Anyway, this joke – and the point it reveals – has finally made it somewhat mainstream via the good offices of Michael Barone, who makes it the central theme of this Washington Examiner column.

Some earlier screencaps of this Bloombergian leitmotif rounded up here.