Maureen's Trouble With Math

Loath though I am to subject myself to Maureen Dowd's choppy, disjointed writing style, I thought I'd check out what she had to say on Inauguration Day. Had Maureen managed to rectify the constant man problems she's been whining about? Maybe, but now she has a woman problem in the person of Condoleeza Rice, Secretary of State designate.

"Was Condi out doing figure eights at the ice skating rink when she should have been home learning her figures? She couldn't have spent much time studying classic word problems: If two trains leave Chicago at noon, one going south at 20 miles an hour and one going north at 30 miles an hour, how far will each have gotten by midnight?"

This bizarre and remarkably catty statement follows a tortured opening referring to Harvard president Lawrence Summers' bon gaffe about women's innate math and science abilities. I guess Mo agrees with Summers when it suits her purpose. Ms. Dowd continues the math metaphor:

"If you multiply 1,370 dead soldiers times zero weapons of mass destruction, that equals zero achievement for Ms. Rice..."

No, Maureen. What you get is the toppling of a brutal dictator, the chance for a new democracy (think Afghanistan), an end to soccer stadium executions, and a place for insane Islamists to meet Allah, that isn't located in Manhattan. But wait, Maureen has some fuzzy math of her own.

"...if you kill one jihadist, two more arrive to take his place; if you kill three, five more pop up; if you get five, eight more appear, and so on."

This is Maureen's version of the marching Chinese canard, though she has no evidence for the assertion. If we have killed 24,000 insurgents since 2003, using Maureen's figures, there are now an additional 48,000. Projecting the trend, in two years there will be an additional 96,000 Jihadists, in 2009 we will see 192,000 and then in 2030 the insurgents will exceed the population of Iraq. If we kill them one at a time, their numbers grow faster than if we kill them five at a time. Therefore, it would seem to behoove us to kill as many at a time as possible. That's using Maureen's math, of course.

"It is puzzling that if you add X (no exit strategy) to Y (Why are we there?) you get W²: George Bush's second inauguration."

No, Maureen, it's only puzzling to liberals who swallow their own hogwash.

Political