Why I Love Stats

From Blog for Oregon, this post not only gets to the heart of the Bush Crisis (or at least one of them) but it points to the glory of statistics and illustrates just how the can be used to make just about any point you need. Bolding added to illustrate my points. An important lesson, folks:

Hitting back against wingnut letters in the O: One of my brother's unpublished masterpieces
Submitted by Ginny Ross - DFO on Mon, 11/28/2005 - 6:38pm.

Bush supporter Richard Divincenzo correctly notes, "On your President Bush-bashing editorial page, there are many letters critical of the president, while there are very few in support." True. But then he continues, "I do not believe that this is typical of the public sentiment."

Wrong.

Last week the letters received by the Oregonian ran 101 to 3 against the Bush administration. In fact, by printing Mr. Divincenzo's pro-Bush letter alongside only two anti-Bush letters (on 11/26/05) the Oregonian is actually showing an extreme right-wing bias, publishing 33% of letters supporting Bush but only 2% of letters opposed.

Perhaps this explains why the Mr. Divincenzo's of America continue to believe we are a divided nation. We aren't. We are, in fact, nearly unanimous in our disapproval of the Bush administration.

Join us, Mr. Divincenzo, and your final plea for us to "once again truly become 'The United States of America'" will be answered.

Burl Ross
Lake Oswego, OR

This post was originally found here.

Where do they get this stuff? Is this (Divincenzo) one of they idiots who is always whining about the Liberal bias in the media? Seems pretty clear that the bias lies on the other side of the fence. I guess they third letter was either unintelligible or contained too many profanities so that by the time it was edited down to fit in the paper all it said was, "I love George."