Mr. Salty

What are you, 13 years old?

Iron_Giant

...and the truth shall set you free...

Quote from the link above:
(I thought the same thing when I heard Moore's claim about only 1 congress' kid in Iraq, I wondered what the national average was - well here is the answer...)


We then see that of 535 Congressional families, there are two with a child who served in Iraq. How does this compare with American families in general? In the summer of 2003, U.S. troop levels in Iraq were raised to 145,000. If we factor in troop rotation, we could estimate that about 300,000 people have served in Iraq at some point. According to the Census Bureau, there were 104,705,000 households in the United States in 2000. (See Table 1 of the Census Report.) So the ratio of ordinary U.S. households to Iraqi service personnel is 104,705,000 to 300,000. This reduces to a ratio of 349:1.

In contrast the ratio of Congressional households to Iraqi service personnel is 535:2. This reduces to a ratio of 268:1.

Stated another way, a Congressional household is about 23 percent more likely than an ordinary household to be closely related to an Iraqi serviceman or servicewoman.

Of course my statistical methodology is very simple. A more sophisticated analysis would look only at Congressional and U.S. households from which at least one child is legally eligible to enlist in the military. Moore, obviously, never attempted such a comparison; instead, he deceived viewers into believing that Congressional families were extremely different from other families in enlistment rates.


***[Moore response: Cites a May 11, 2003 article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that only Brooks Johnson had a son who had fought in Iraq. The article was accurate at the time, since Duncan Hunter's son, who had already enlisted, had not yet been sent to Iraq. But Fahrenheit premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2004--two months after it had been reported that Duncan Hunter's son had been sent to Iraq. At the least, Moore could apologize that his claim about "only one" child is inaccurate, and blame the error on his having not noticed the news about Hunter while the movie was in its final production stages. But instead, Moore continues to repeat the "only one" claim, which is indisputably false. Moore offers no defense for the other falsehoods in this section.]***


(There are sooooo many facts that MM twisted/Edited to his own point of view.)

darkside

So his point that people of privledge protect their kids from going to war is wrong?

I think our most recent two presidents are better evidence than anything in Moore's movie of how true that is.

Dead

I'd suggest that you drop the personal attacks.