No, you DON'T understand math. Deal with it.

I swear, I don't get paid enough to teach remedial arithmetic, which is what seems to be required back here, as commenter "hooligan" demonstrates, once and for all, that he doesn't understand fractions. Let's settle this once and for all, shall we?

• 22.222/21.875 = 1.016 (or a difference of 1.6%)


• 59.2M/55.7M = 1.063 (or a difference of 6.3%)

the first fraction being the change (a decrease) in the percentage of women in Harper's cabinet after the rearrangement of the deck chairs, the second being the difference in votes between George W. and John Kerry in 2004.

Now, it's safe to say that, given the sample size in the first case, the difference is really meaningless but, if the whingers want to play with numbers, then we can do that. If you take those values literally, it's amusing to note how whingers, while hysterically dismissing a change of 1.6%, still consider a change of 6.3% massively overwhelming enough to have referred to Bush's election victory as a "mandate." But it doesn't end there, oh, no.

As you can read at that article, that Bush victory percentage (all 6.3% of it) wasn't simply a "mandate." Hell, no, it was a "popular mandate", a "solid mandate", a "decisive mandate", a "clear mandate", an "extraordinary mandate", a "landslide mandate" and "the kind of mandate that few politicians are ever fortunate enough to receive." All this hyper-ventilating hyperbole, despite the fact that "With the exception of the 2000 election, Bush's popular vote margin of about 3.6 million votes (out of approximately 115 million total votes cast) was the smallest since 1976, when then-Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter (D) defeated President Gerald R. Ford (R) by about 1.7 million votes."

So how about getting a grip there? Anyone who gets this pants-wettingly excited over 6.3% has pretty much lost the moral high ground to turn up their nose at 1.6%. And if you still can't follow the math here, go take a course. Seriously.