[ProudGOP]

"There are 40 million AIDS cases a day and if we don't do something about it, there will be 100 million AIDS cases a day."

I must be missing something.

Assume there are 4 Billion people in the world. 40 million aids cases a day means in 100 days everyone in the world has aids.

4,000,000,000 / 40,000,000 = 100

Even if there are 8 billion people, that would mean in 200 days we all have Aids.

What am I missing?

[Wyatt's Torch]

C'mon. The math doesn't matter. The sh$%head really cares!

[Pokey78]

What am I missing?

My guess is that Bubba thinks everyone in the world has sex with as many clueless bimbos as he does; so using his deductive powers, we'll all have AIDS in 200 days.

[StriperSniper]

See my Post#41.

[RightWhale]

I must be missing something

Remember this is political science, not a mathematical science. Numbers in Bill's universe have aesthetic rather than logical values.

[Michael Barnes]

I was scratching my head too..Where the hell did that number come from? Last I heard, the CDC said there were 40K new cases LAST YEAR. Not in a day.

[Dan Day]

What am I missing?

You're missing Clinton's willingness to use bogus, scary-sounding figures to further his causes.

I'm still boggled by the way he spent several months stumping for gun control with the phrase, "the United States has a higher child gun death rate than the next 24 biggest countries combined."

Sounds bad, eh? Sounds like he's saying that even if you put the next 24 countries together, there still wouldn't be as many shot children as in the US alone, right?

Wrong.

The sleight-of-hand here is that "rates" don't get bigger when you "combine" them, they AVERAGE. What Clinton is *really* saying here is that the US rate for children killed with guns is higher than the average of the top 25 industrial nations -- not very scary after all. But he says it in a way that carefully makes it *sound* like "more kids get shot here than everwhere else put together". Or, some listeners may interpret it as "the US rate is the highest rate of any of the top 25 countries". Neither is true. What cynical propaganda.

To illustrate the problem, I could truthfully say that "my house has a higher rate of cat ownership than the other 90 million American households combined". What I'm really saying is that I have more cats than average. But it sure *sounds* like I own more than half the nation's cats, doesn't it?

Interestingly, his gun control nonsense uses the same sort of "confuse the listener about the distinction between totals and rates" dishonesty that he's doing with the AIDS speech.