THE HUFFINGTON POST Dow Jones Hits 'Record High' Thanks To Strong Performances From Smoke, Mirrors Sectors Posted: 03/09/2013 9:04 am EST This week, amid the hullabaloo over President Barack Obama's Deficit Dinner Diplomacy, and Sen. Rand Paul's 13-hour filibuster-cum-dissertation on drone strikes and civil liberties, financial news- watchers touted a milestone in their lives of Market Worship. We speak, of course, of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which on Tuesday hit an "all-time high" of 14,253.77. The good times rolled steady on through the week, and the Dow closed Friday at 14,397.07. Of course, the notion that these were "record" highs was not, strictly speaking, true. As Jeff Cox as CNBC pointed out, "in inflation-adjusted dollars, the Dow would need to hit 15,731.54 to break the record." Nevertheless, the exciting new ordinal number sitting on the stock market index set off a chorus of hallelujahs. After all, this was the highest mark it had hit since October 2007. (Of course, if we recall correctly, it was about that time that all of our more recent tragic economic events began to occur.) The fluctuations of the Dow are typically pored over, by the media, in the same way the ancient oracles pieced through the entrails of birds, seeking for whatever path leads to the most prosperity. And in the world of politics, partisans on both sides are quick to point to the Dow as generic confirmation that their policies are working. As long as the story suits their narrative, anyway. And those narratives can sure get woolly and weird quickly. Seemingly within moments of the Dow's peak, Nobel Laureate For Dumbness In Extremis and "Dow 36,000" author James K. Glassman was in the pages of Bloomberg View (proving once again that there's a sort of "Greater Fool Theory" at work in the media, incentivizing normally sensible editors to immediately reach out to capture the point of view of the biggest nincompoops in their Rolodexes), crowing about how h