Yeah, I Thought So

One of my glib thoughtless comments during the madcap live blog of Bush’s speech last night was this:

8:13 - 160,000 security forces trained and equipped? Someone's going to look that up, right? Because that's more than we have U.S. soldiers for crying out loud. I started writing this sentence before he even said the number. I knew the number he was going to say would be at least three times what I thought it could possibly be in a perfect world.

I knew someone would be fact checking that bad boy, and I knew that someone was going to be Think Progress.

Fact: According to the Brookings Institution, as of May 2005, only 50,000 troops were proficient and well-equipped. [Brookings, 6/3/05]

I must say I’m as shocked and appalled as Senator Dorgan was to discover that President Bush would lie about something so important. It’s almost as if he wants to present a picture of Iraq that sounds brighter and more optimistic than reality would allow... Nah... He probably just looked at the wrong chart – maybe the chart with the number of dead Iraqi civilians. Easy mistake to make.