Markets down on decline in bullshit consumption

The stock market today took a nose-dive on reports that consumer confidence in the US was down to just above it's lowest level in a decade (via Americablog). The main culprit behind the crash was the bullshit industry, which reported a steady decline in consumption in recent months.

"For the past four and a half years, the bullshit industry had been posting huge gains as Americans continued to guzzle down massive amounts of the stuff and kept asking for more. It was like people couldn't get enough of it. This consumer enthusiasm was propping up the stock market", commented a Wall Street broker. "But ultimately, it turned out to be just another bubble as confidence in the industry recently dropped to new lows."

There were a number of reasons behind the recent below-average performance of the industry, which upto now has done remarkably well under the Bush presidency. War-bullshit, which accounts for more than 75% of the bullshit consumed in the country, suffered a hit recently when the President, in his latest address to the nation, tried to convince Americans that the size and number of indigenous Iraqi troops has increased, whereas figures show that the number of battle-ready Iraqi battalions, in fact, dropped from three, seven months ago, to currently just one.

Consumer confidence also took a major blow when the President repeatedly announced the captures or slayings of a number of "no.2 lieutenants" of the notorious Iraqi terrorist, Abu Musab Al-Zarkawi, thus begging the question, how many no.2 lieutenants does Al-Zarkawi really have?

However, the final straw that broke the bullshit industry's back was President Bush's latest assertion that the government had disrupted 10 Al Qaida plots since 9/11, whereas in reality, these 10 plots included one three-year old arrest in a case where no charges have been filed, one two-year old arrest related to a plot that was already abandoned and eight “incidents” the administration won’t tell the public anything about. (via ThinkProgress)

In utterly unrelated news, Blogger has added a free "Traffic Augmentation" feature, which will increase the number of hits captured by a blog simply by slowing Blogger down to such an extent that every reader has to refresh his browser multiple times in order to access the blog.