Scott Pruitt, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, is a wholly owned subsidiary of the extraction and energy industries. That's all he is. That's the sum total of his entire public life. That's what he was when he was the attorney general for Oklahoma, and that's what he is now in his new gig. He wouldn't have his new gig if he wasn't what he's always been. This overriding characteristic requires him to deal in all manner of hooey and crapola, but Pruitt surpassed even himself on Sunday, when he dropped by The Clinton Guy Shocked By Blowjobs's Sunday show.

He was eager to defend the president* and the decision to remove the United States from the Paris Climate Accords. He did so by inventing some numbers and, along with the numbers, inventing some jobs, as well. From CNN:

"We've had over 50,000 jobs since last quarter — coal jobs, mining jobs — created in this country. We had almost 7,000 mining and coal jobs created in the month of May alone."

Wait. What?

This is comically untrue.

The U.S. now has about 51,000 coal mining jobs, a far cry from the 89,400 positions counted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics at the end of 2011. Another way to think of it: coal mining employs less than half as many people as struggling JCPenney (JCP), which listed 106,000 workers as of late January.

Is it possible that Pruitt is dumb enough to have mistaken the total number of jobs in the coal industry for the number created in May? It's possible, but I think he saw an opportunity to sneak one by the country and make his various bosses in and out of the White House happy.

Again, it's not so much that they lie, but that they're so obvious about it.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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