The Commonwealth's Speaker of the House Sal DiMasi has long been seen as the biggest obstacle in the way of Governor Deval Patrick's plan to build three luxury casinos in the Bay State. DiMasi lived up to that reputation yesterday by delivering a blistering attack against the governor's projections for how many jobs the initiative would create.

A Globe piece made clear on Sunday that Patrick's numbers are lazy at best, and exceedingly misleading at worst. The people behind Suffolk Downs are interested in opening a casino in East Boston, and they claim that their establishment would create 10,000 new construction jobs. Patrick's team then multiplied that by three and stated that their three casino plan would create 30,000 jobs. An independent analyst commissioned for the Globe article suggested that 4,000-5,000 jobs for three years would be a more reasonable goal.

DiMasi rightly called Patrick's math "absurd" and stated, "The Governor clearly has the burden of convincing the Legislature that this casino plan should be adopted. So far, the case has not been made, the evidence isn't there and the Governor's arguments for casinos are clearly losing credibility."

Patrick responded by saying, "There are going to be all kinds of claims about whether it's 30,000 construction jobs or 20,000 construction jobs or 5,000 construction jobs. I can tell you that whatever the number is, it beats the opposition, which is zero."

It's certainly true that 5,000 or 500 or 50 jobs is better than no new job growth. But Patrick's administration should have known that trotting out biased, utopian numbers would lead to blowback like this. They just strengthened DiMasi's hand.