I’ve been laughing for two days now over the allegation from Jack Welch, former head of GE, that President Obama’s campaign cooked the jobless figures to make the president look good one month before the election.

The jobless rate fell to 7.8 percent in September. It’s now below that 8-percent threshold that Republican nominee Mitt Romney has been using as a benchmark for Obama’s “failed economic policies.” What’s more, the job growth totaled 114,000 in the past month, which isn’t exactly a sparkling number.

What proof did Welch produce to back up his claim that the Bureau of Labor Statistics manipulated the numbers? None. It was a gut feeling, he told TV talking heads. And yet the media have reported this hunch as all but fact, ginning up a frenzied reaction among commentators and pundits on the right.

Let’s just point out a couple of things. First, the BLS is run by career bureaucrats, not political hacks. Also, this is the same outfit that revealed disappointing jobs numbers the day after the Democrats renominated Obama in early September at their national convention in Charlotte, N.C.; indeed, those tepid job-growth figures likely tamped down the post-convention bounce that Obama got afterward.

I say we ought to file Welch’s contention away with the rest of the baloney spewed out by the conservative media, which attach themselves to any phony conspiracy that damages Barack Obama.