Jon Chait mauls Ari Fleischer:
A couple things stand out here. First, Fleischer seems to think that the concept of 40 percent is so difficult that his readers won't understand it without a real-life illustration. Gee, Ari, you're throwing around all these fancy numbers, but what does 40 percent really mean? Oh, 40 out of 100. Now I get it.
The next thing I notice is that this claim is very different from the headline of his column. If 40 percent are paying no taxes, then 60 percent are paying taxes, and thus would not, technically, be considered a "minority." Rather than tax Fleischer's brain with fancy mathematical formulas (60 > 40), I'll break it down for him in simple, homey terms. Think of it this way, Ari: After cashing in on a famous career lying for the Bush administration, you haul several large bags of cash to the bank, where you're standing in a line of 100 people. Forty of those people are former Bush staffers cashing their ill-gotten rewards from K Street. Therefore 60 of them are not. Sixty is a larger number than 40.
In Soviet Russia, the whole thing reads you.
Update: And via Petey, this page of Russian Reversal jokes and theory is pretty awesome.
