If I did a study on car stealing, and only looked at statistics on minorities to "prove" that minorities are the worst car thieves, I would be hounded out of the room, and properly so.

As far as your theory on Bush originating all the intelligence on Iraq, and the poor gormless Democrats going along with it (including intelligence committee members):

I have cut you some slack by keeping this discussion in the Bush era. Don't assume this means that all the intelligence background we had on Iraq suddenly appeared full-blown in 2002, or that all of it came from Bush flunkies in the U.S. intelligence community, or even from the U.S. alone. I've flattened people on that before. Do I have to do it again?

A lie is telling people something you know is not true. It's not the same thing as a "false statement." If I say there is a cat in the box, and I know the box is empty, that's a lie. If I say there's a cat in the box because somebody told me there was a cat in the box, and I open it to find out it's empty, that's a "false statement." Cripes, did you look at their "methodology?"

I can't believe I have to do frigging parables to explain things like that. I know you're smarter that this. Small wonder "studies" like this fall on fertile ground. Look for people like Keith Olbermann to jump on this like a starving dog on a steak. Apparently that idiot Kucinich already did.

Your attempt to connect that graph to elections doesn't hold up, either. There's a random high point before a Congressional election. So what? There are much higher points after that election. The rate drops again before Bush's own presidential election, when you think it would really go up if your theory held water. But it doesn't. I ran a database search from the end of December 2003, to November 2004 to see if there was a not-visible spike on the end of that graph during a critical election year. The total number of statements for that entire period was 48. The total number for the pre-election months of September and October of 2004 was seven.

As an aside, I learned something else from looking at the database: How many "statements" were second or third-hand, including quotes from "tell-all" books verified by no other sources.

Again, not impressing me in the intellectual honesty department.