George Will and Arianna Huffington Switch Roles on ABC's This Week

Prior to watching Rich Lowry say, "Eleanor [Clift] hit it on the head" on Sunday's McLaughlin Group, conservatives saw likely an even odder event on ABC's This Week.

George Will and Arianna Huffington curiously exchanged roles with him saying the recent unemployment numbers were good for President Obama and her claiming they're weren't (video follows with transcript and commentary):

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, HOST: Politically it is an important trend, it's an important dip.

ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: I don't really think it is. I think Democrats are really fooling themselves if they think this is wonderful news, because that's not what people are experiencing. The truth is another number that I'm obsessed with that only 7 percent of the people who have found jobs since the financial crisis have found jobs at the level of the job they had lost. So, that means that the jobs that people are getting are low- paying jobs, they're not the kind of jobs that will keep people in the middle class. And what is happening right now is that people are dropping out of the middle class into poverty and that's really a major factor that's going to affect the Democrats in this election.

AMANPOUR: And George, one of the main factors is going affect, it could be Angela Merkel and the people in Europe. I mean, I know it doesn't get talked about much, but certainly the White House must be sweating bullets over what's happening in Europe.

GEORGE WILL: Yeah. The president has already shifted his alibi machine from George W. Bush caused my problems to the European Central Bank. People knows George W. Bush, no one in America knows what the Europe Central Bank is or does. But he's right in the sense that what economists called an exogenous shock, which would be the default of Greece contagion to Portugal, Spain, Italy, something else is far more important than this. It's just one more bit of rain on this parade. 50,000 of those new jobs were retail jobs, probably seasonal hired for the Christmas season.

All that said, I disagree with Arianna, if the trend is good in 2012 as it was for Ronald Reagan where unemployment started under him at 10.8 percent, Ronald Reagan rode that raising tide of good news to a 49 state win.

HUFFINGTON: But Ronald Reagan, that's the question, are you better off now than four years ago? And Barack Obama can not ask that question and expect an answer "Yes." And that's really the fundamental problem. 

When you add in what happened on the McLaughlin Group, it's almost like our predictably liberal and conservative pundits this weekend chose to engage in a political Sadie Hawkins dance.

Rather unsettling, isn't it?