I've been watching military recruiting goals lately, because the prospect has been bandied about that America isn't recruiting enough troops to "win the war on terror." (I'll withhold the gazillion-won't-do-it discussion here.)So, when Stephen Colbert launched his Wørd segment last night ("Achieve victory by defining victory as the current reality") on the accusation that the Army had lowered its December 2006 recruiting goals from 7,000 recruits to 700 recruits (and then "beat expectations" by 23%), I was quite interested.
December recruiting goals for
the Army are always very low.
(Who signs up before Christmas?)Unfortunately, after a rather extensive search, I found this New York Times article which shows that historically, December has always been a "700 kind of month" for military recruiting.
So sorry Stephen. Not that the U.S.Army isn't having a tough time finding recruits, but at least regarding the prospect that the Army was originally expecting 7,000 recruits this past December... You're a bit fulluvit on this one.
However, next time, feel free to talk about the military stooping to accepting convicts with an IQ of 80 as new recruits if you want to highlight some major realities.
2 comments:
CLer here. Good catch. I'm all for funny, but I'm also for accuracy.
It was probably laziness in fact checking on the part of Colbert's people. They probably saw numbers like "October - 7000, November - 7000, December - 700" and made an incorrect assumption.
It struck me as being so odd that I had to check it out. You think that the people writing the jokes would have done the same.
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