by Jim Paine

The reporter's rule regarding the credibility of sources has always been expressed as "if your mother tells you the sun rises in the east—verify." If this rule had any reason to exist, it is in its application to Ward Churchill.

While Churchill is arguably not a "mother," his every utterance, his every written word, is proof that the maxim is a necessary weapon in any reporter's intellectual arsenal.

And proving Churchill is incorrect, or misleading, or lying, is not difficult. One only needs to choose an assertion—any assertion—and google it (or in our case, MSN Search it). We did it as an exercise here in relation to Churchill's claim in his infamous "roosting chickens" essay that US sanctions were responsible for 500,000 dead Iraqi children. Charlie Brennan did it here on Churchill's lack of math skills in that same essay. Professor Thomas Brown did it here on a wide range of Churchill's fabrications, and Professor John LaVelle does it here for a gamut of Churchill "facts."

In fact, it's our assertion that any declarative statement written or uttered by Churchill that has his untruths excised would consist entirely of definite and indefinite articles, some inconsequential pronouns, and an occasional "and" or "therefore."

For example, let's remove the demonstrable untruths from this Churchill quote:

"All told, Iraq has a population of about 18 million. The 500,000 kids lost to date thus represent something on the order of 25 percent of their age group.”

We find quickly that Churchill's fabrications aren't even internally consistent (don't worry; we'll do the math).

Since the quote is from 2001, let's look at actual population figures for Iraq for that period: 23.6 million (source: United Nations Population Fund). We've already dealt with the "500,000 kids lost..." phrase, so that leaves us with the "25 percent of their age group."

Well, in 2001, minors did, in fact, represent 26% of the U.S. population (source: Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics), but the CIA World Factbook says that in 2005 Iraqi children ages 0-14 years account for 40% of the country's total population, and we'll make a guess that that age group comprised roughly the same proportion of the population in 2001—which means that there were roughly 9.3 million children under the age of 16 in Iraq in 2001, which means that Churchill's "something on the order of 25 percent of their age group" is five times the actual percentage of 5.34%. (If, like Churchill, you prefer not to trust the CIA, the WorldPress website has similar estimates: Iraq population in 2001: 23.3 million, with 41.64% of that population aged 0-14 years.)

So, after expunging the provable misrepresentations, misleading "facts" and outright lies from Churchill's original quote, what are we left with?

"All told, Iraq has a population."

And that, dear readers, is a Churchill statement with which we can all agree.



Update: It only occured to us after posting this commentary that it represents a "reverse dowdification" of Churchill's words. Dowdification (first coined by James Taranto of Opinion Journal's Best of the Web) is the process of selectively quoting a source by omitting actual phrases from a sentence in order to make the resulting statement say something very different from what the source intended. Since the dowdification process invariably results in a lie, we see our work above as a sort of reverse-dowdification, since the result arrives at a truth (however mundane).