Captain Ed, redux.

And just because I'm in that kind of mood this morning, I'm going to give Captain Ed (or as I feel like referring to him from now on, "Gilligan") a couple more quick towel snaps to the nads.

Back on May 18, Gilligan wrote of Rep. John Murtha:

Murtha gained notoriety last year when he demanded an immediate and precipitate withdrawal of all troops from Iraq.

Jesus, here we go again with the "immediate withdrawal" nonsense. As even the minimally functionally literate can read here, Murtha was proposing no such thing (emphasis added):

My plan calls:

To immediately redeploy U.S. troops consistent with the safety of U.S. forces.
To create a quick reaction force in the region.
To create an over- the- horizon presence of Marines.
To diplomatically pursue security and stability in Iraq

Did you catch that, Gilligan? Not "withdraw." "Redeploy." There's a difference, at least to those of us who are making an effort to not be pathological liars on the subject. But Gilligan's dishonesty doesn't end there. Catch this beauty, further down in that same paragraph (emphasis again added):

[Murtha] claimed that victory was impossible and that the US forces were sitting ducks for terrorists. Since them [sic], with the exception of one month, US casualties have declined rapidly and the Iraqi forces have demonstrated increasing ability to operate independently.

Really? They have? Wow, then the good guys must actually be winning. So, ignoring Gilligan's fiction about Iraqi forces being better able to operate independently, let's check out those casualty figures. Since Murtha's statement was in November 2005, and Gilligan wrote his article in mid-May 2006, it makes sense to check the numbers for November through April, right? And according to the "Iraq Coalition Casualty Count," we see the monthly figures of U.S. casualties: 84, 68, 62, 55, 31, 76.

So Gilligan has a point there. Well, almost. I mean, that last figure of 76 for April 2006 kind of fucks up the trend, doesn't it? Just when you thought things were looking good, along comes April and blows a hole in your rosy outlook on life. Drat.

Granted, Gilligan does admit that there is a one-month exception to his precious trend but that is one hell of an exception, isn't it? It's kind of like saying, hey, since George W. Bush took office, there hasn't been a single terrorist attack on U.S. soil. Well, all right, there was that spot of unpleasantness back in September of 2001 but, if it weren't for that, he'd have a perfect record. Naturally, it doesn't occur to Gilligan that he just got lucky with a sequence of declining casualties for those few months. If you look back further in time, it should be obvious that monthly figures bounce around regularly. But that's not the best part. Oh, no, not by a long shot.

Notice that Gilligan touts the wonders of his alleged trend, and admits that, well, yes, there is a one-month exception to it. But he made that claim on May 18, 2006, when it was already clear that May was also going to be a bad month. Sure, technically, May hadn't ended yet, but given that that month ended up having 67 U.S. deaths, is there any possible way to have not realized it was not going to turn out well by the time the month was more than half over?

Luckily, we don't need to speculate. We can go straight to the daily casualty reports for that month to see that, by May 17 -- the day before Gilligan wrote his piece, the U.S. had already lost 45 troops. So, assuming that there was little chance of any of those dead spontaneously coming back to life, it was already a foregone conclusion that May was also going to be an exception to Gilligan's optimistic outlook. But admitting that was probably not going to help his argument. Therefore, bye bye.

That's why people describe me as part of the "reality-based community." And why they describe Gilligan as a dick.

JEDI-STYLE UPDATE: I sense a disturbance in the force ... it feels like ... unimaginable stupidity. Ah, there it is.