Beat the Last Throes Rush

     November 29th, 2005 will be the six month anniversary of Vice President's comments on Larry King Live that the insurgency is in its last throes (covered here by DailyKos).

     Let's be generous for a moment and suggest that he wasn't simply knowingly lying, and that he wasn't simply attempting to deceive us.  Surely even Stalwart Republicans can agree that either of those activities are wrong.  The only remaining conclusion is that he is, in fact, clueless about how things are going in Iraq.  A couple other facts, beyond the graph below.  The total number of insurgents killed or captured is now 53,000.  The Pentagon has usually said there were under 20,000 insurgents total.  I guess that means we've killed or captured them all two and a half times now.  These facts, and the below graph, comes from the Brookings Institute's Iraq Index, current as of today.