I was too busy today doing research on an upcoming post to express my opinion on the ridiculous reaction to the retail data. In my best “Tomnitz-ese”, the state of the shopping world “sucks.” But commentators suggested that no one should worry, they’ll do better next time and go buy some retail stocks even though you are clearly not buying enough at their stores. Once again, financial media puts a bullish spin on the story, keeps repeating the absurd weather excuse for retail failure, and then it becomes accepted as investing fact. Pathetic! Investors need to do better than listen to this crap and worse yet, buy these stocks.   It is supposed to be cold in February and if retailers aren’t expecting that, shouldn’t we be holding them accountable for being morons?  And how about those Wal-Mart numbers? Aren’t you getting tired of dealing with their sales guidance, revisions, and misses? I guess most investors don’t care very much since the stock has not suffered the usual consequences for unreliable guidance and has traded within 5% on each side of the current price since October. If Wal-Mart is the proxy for American consumerism - we are in trouble regardless of the temperature. Rather than going into a full rant, I am going to just defer to Barry Ritholtz’s post on the subject of retail sales as it could not be better said. Please do yourself a favor and click here to read the shopping list of excuses.