God, I just get so tired sometimes. I can’t even laugh anymore.

Holy God, that is sick. Someone please see to it that fire ants eat out the entrails and eyeballs of these individuals while they remain alive.

You likely suffer from liberal outrage fatigue, as documented in the Onion.

Well, see, 2 times $11B is $22B, which is only 22% more than $18B, so $18B is nearly double $11B.

QED

I see* it clearly now through my new Scotty glasses.

* – with 10/80 vision.

I definitely have outrage fatigue…

so a few months ago I decided to start saving it all up for NYC’04.

See you there. Be sheep for peace.

And who can forget all those vets disabled from all those IEDs out there in… Bosnia? Wait, there were what, two, no, three US casualties in Bosnia. No, it was Germany where all the Clinton vets got shot at, right? Didn’t something bad happen in Germany? Food poisoning at Ramstein or something? Dysentery at Ft. Hood?

I’m sure we can scrounge up “Disabled Forgotten Clinton Vets for Truth” and 11,997 signatures to match the Iraq casualty figures.

That is hilarious! I always think of the HAL 9000 computer when I look at Scottie.

A nice, gentle creature designed to be helpful, programmed to lie by the government, slowly loses its mind.

Soon, Scott will tell Helen to take a stress pill…

It’s amazing to me that they even lie when they don’t need to. All they had to say was that, if Bush’s 2005 budget is approved, spending for veterans will have increased by more in Bush’s first term (37.6%) than in both of Clinton’s combined (31.7%). It’s still misleading since it completely ignores changes in the population being supported that drove the requirements submitted by the Department (which weren’t met), but at least it’s not an obvious lie.
(I assume you meant 1993 vice 1994 above as that is the proper baseline year.)

fuzzy math again

I guess they were worried that if they did a true comparison, somebody would notice that Bush increased the DoD budget by 42.8% in just three years while Clinton only increased it by 15.9% in eight.
(Naturally none of these numbers are corrected for inflation.)

Does Scottie hold up his fingers for the “scare quotes”?

That would be cool. And appropriate.

I dunno. More vets under Bush needing more care as they get older like the rest of us. And care esp the drugs, that is more expensive under Bush. If I were a Bush vet, I’d want to get the same benefits that a Clinton vet got. But the pretty bar graph doesn’t show me that. It’s a pretty picture for the management side and their program costs. McClellan of course is excusable, but those other guys at the institute guarding us from misinformation?

Come on, Bush has been producing sick and disabled veterans at rate far in excess of the Clinton administration. Clinton wasn’t even really trying to get the members of the military killed and wounded, what kind of a leader is that?

“Under the President, funding* for our veterans has more than doubled over the previous eight years.”

Correct me if I’m wrong, but hasn’t bush been in office only three and a half years, not ‘eight’?
And as such shouldn’t this be corrected to say..
“Under former president Clinton and George W. Bush, funding*……”
Seems like that thing is ripe with errors in it.

MYOB’
.

Next McClellan will be lauding the Bush administration for making the value of “pi” equal to 3.

respectfully, you may be reading this wrong. kurt vonnegut incorporated an asterisk into his signature as an admission that he is an asshole. this may be refreshingly honest.

The Truth About Bush “Doubling” Funding for Vets

Sadly, No! tracks the truth about the Bush claim that they have doubled funding for Veterans benefits. It turns out that they don’t mean — though they do say — the actually doubled benefits, but that they doubled the increases of the Clinton years. H…

I think we’ve all misinterpreted the statement (which isn’t our fault); I think Scotty meant that the percentage increase per year, on average, under Bush was double that under Clinton. This is actually true. (Of course, there are still arguments as to whether the increases have been sufficient and whether Bush’s actions have exacerbated the situation.)

Breathtakingly, Scotty and crew couldn’t make this simple statement clear, even with a damn footnote.

But, oh, the best part! You left out the best part! Right after Scotty managed his verbal asterisk line, he said this:

“So it sounds like it’s more of the same false attacks that have already been discredited.”

He says something baldly false (as stated), then swiftly follows with a moan about false attacks. I, too, vote for the fire ants.

Good one, Mason.

In 2nd movie with HAL 9000, they could be talking about Scottie:

“He was ordered to lie — by people who find it easy to lie. But he doesn’t know how….”

Gosh, and I was all fired up to post on this…

I just went and read the actual transcript, and somehow I read it differently. It’s not out of context up above, but for some reason after looking at the transcript, I now read Scooby’s comment to mean, under this President’s term as compared to Clinton’s “previous eight years.” So he is contrasting term vs. term (not the past eight years over both Administrations).

Now, his numbers may still be bullshit, and probably are, but I don’t read it (anymore) as Bush trying to take credit for Clinton’s program. So it seems like just another bookkeeping fib as opposed to a crazy-ass rip-off manuever.

Giving Scottie the benefit of the doubt (that “twice the increase” really means “roughly the same increase, in half the time” (which, truthfully, gives a bit more than “twice the average rate of increase” taken from a purely mathematical perspective … 30% increase over 8 years is not equal to 15% increase in each of the four-year parts … but we never elected Bush to be Mathematician in Chief.)

The core fallacy here is an old one. Quote an absolute increase, and claim that since your absolute increase was more than someone else’s you are a generous soul. Or, quote a percentage increase, and claim the same. The truth of the matter is, the percentage increase doesn’t matter, and the absolute increase sure as hell doesn’t matter, in the absense of figures showing how the demand for those dollars increased over the same time periods.

From anecdotal evidence, the “pain level” of veterans’ groups has increased dramatically over the past three years. They are seeing record membership growth, and “historical average” funding growth. This is the way Republicans kill projects, not with cuts but with freezes.

Scrub

House Speaker Dennis Hastert told a crowd at a Dick Cheney campaign rally that al Qaeda plans to attack the United States because they want George W. Bush to loose the election. That explans the 9/11 attacks since al Qaeda was afraid that Bush would …