Until this post by Dispatcher Ed, I'd all but forgotten about our old friend Gribbit, a purveyor of empty threats against liberal life and limb but a very real menace to basic cognition. (Be warned -- all of the bells, whistles, icons and add-ons on his site may befrigger and stymie even the hardiest and most bad-code-resistant Web browsers).

You know you're in for a special ride when one of Gribbit's posts contains either mathematical operators or Latin words; here, he supplies both. In another dolorous shitburst concerning the various ways in which illegal immigrants have ruined things for America's most important demographic (consisting, loosely speaking, of newly converted illiterate white rednecks with anger-management issues), Gribbit asserts:

According to statistics compiled by US Congressman Steve King (R-5th CD Iowa),

• 13 Americans are killed each day by uninsured drunk driving illegals
• 12 U.S. citizens die a violent death at the hands of murderous illegal aliens each day in crimes

Do the math.

[ (12 + 13) x 365 = 9125 ]

That's more than nine thousand people killed every year in the United States by illegal aliens.

By contrast, consider the death toll for US servicemen in Iraq and Afghanistan since the beginning of the war on terror, as reported last week by the Department of Defense:

• Total U.S. troop deaths in Iraq as of last week were reported at 2,863.
• Total U.S. troop deaths in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Uzbekistan during the five years of the Afghan campaign are currently at 289.

Again, do the math.

[ (2863 + 289) divided by five years of war = 630 ]

So illegal aliens in the United States are more than fourteen times as lethal (14.48 actually) as a full scale armed conflict.

Quod erat demonstrando.

But even leaving out that fact that using the number of servicepersons killed in the Iraq war as a measure of the Islamic terrorist threat is even more ridiculous than using King's stats as an assay of the threat posed by illegals (does the fact that white people drive drunk and kill people mean they should have to go, too? Say, don't intoxicated, philandering and licentious politicans cause problems at an especially high rate?), Gribbit has once again -- to spin things gently in his favor -- demonstrated stupefying and galactic analytical incompetence. Highlighting his failure to account for the fact that the war in question -- which is not a "war on terror" at all -- is not taking place in American populaton centers, as are DUI wrecks, is superfluous.

"Do the math," this ersatz prognathous canine implores us; "Quod erat demonstrando," he slobbers and gibbers with almost poignantly ill-founded confidence, this latest would-be envoy to the Holy See aglow in the sad grandeur of the self-delusional autofellatio repeatedly catalyzing his and his pals' retrograde verbal ejaculations into the diseased prostate of the blogosphere.

What Gribbit has claimed -- in effect if not in the substance of the details -- is that because more Americans die each year from complications of diabetes mellitus than in gang warfare, sugar is more lethal than gunfire. I can think of better analogies and I'm sure you can too, but I can think of no better coda than to let this thrumming joke of an "essay" speak for itself.