Gateway Pundit: Still a Lying Sack of Shit

May 24, 2007 in Political Animals | 3 comments

That lying turd Gateway Pundit is at it again.

Every so often, he’ll post a graphic that supposedly proves that military deaths under Bush are far lower than they were under Clinton. What he never, ever, tells his readers is that he is comparing total military deaths (from both hostile and non-hostile actions) under Clinton to the number of deaths of military personnel under Bush counting Iraq and Afghanistan alone.

In other words, Gateway Pundit is deliberately skewing the numbers by leaving out military deaths that did not occur in those two theaters. The simple fact of the matter is that more military personnel have already died during the six-and-a-half years of the Bush administration than did during the entire eight-year Clinton administration.

One of GP’s commenters, using statistics from the Department of Defense, has pointed out the deception. As of this writing, GP hasn’t found the balls to answer. A similar tactic in a column that ran in the The New York Sun last February was quickly exposed as a fraud by Media Matters.

There’s a word for what Gateway Pundit does: lying. Nothing else fits. It seems to be GP’s main pastime. One wonders if he believes his own lies, or is simply marvelling at the ease with which he can bamboozle his readers.

  1. JEM on May 24, 2007 at 4:41 pm

    Agreed that the numbers aren’t apples-to-apples, but one point is still valid – the casualty rate in Iraq and Afghanistan is tiny compared to past conflicts and absolutely minuscule relative to the US population.

    The real problem is that with the repeated deployments of our small combat force it’s the same guys who keep getting shot at. The burden isn’t spread around.

    The question since Vietnam has always been whether, and if so under what conditions and for what kind of causes, this country could ever tolerate significant casualties in a shooting war. It’s still an open issue.

  2. meatbrain on May 24, 2007 at 5:09 pm

    “Agreed that the numbers aren’t apples-to-apples, but one point is still valid – the casualty rate in Iraq and Afghanistan is tiny compared to past conflicts and absolutely minuscule relative to the US population.”

    Well, that makes it all right, then. As long as the death rate (not “casualty rate”, that’s something different!) is “miniscule”, we can keep sending Americans into the meatgrinder that is Iraq, and keep bringing them back in body bags, yes?

    It’ll all be fine. Since we don’t can’t see the caskets of returning soldiers killed in this war, we really don’t have to bother our pretty little heads about how many are dying over there.

  3. mel on May 27, 2007 at 1:34 am

    MB, good catch. The day we stop teaching our children that facts are the playthings of the gods will be exactly one generation from the day that shit like what GP pulls becomes bad form.

    And JEM, that kind of rationalization (really, just a tight collection of fallacies) is what keeps us on this fucking merry-go-round.