WOODWARD QUESTIONS A NITWIT

Bob Woodward questioned David Brooks' numerical claim about what would happen if we pull out of Iraq. The transcript below doesn't capture the "WTF are you talking about, Brooksie?" tone in Woodward's voice but fortunately, ThinkProgress has the video clip.

MR. BROOKS: Well, if we leave, we could see 250,000 Iraqis die. You had the John Burns’ quotation earlier in the program. So are we willing to prevent 10,000 Iraqi deaths a month at the cost of 125 Americans? That’s a tough moral issue, but it’s also a tough national interest issue because we don’t know what the consequences of getting out are. And the frustration of watching the debate in Washington, very few people are willing to, to grapple with those two facts, that there’s—that the surge will not work in the short-term, but getting out will be cataclysmic. And you see politicians on both sides evading one of those two facts. But you’ve got to grapple with them both.

[I elide remarks by war whore and Cheney worshipper Stephen Hayes]

MR. WOODWARD: And the problem, though, is, we don’t know. People can say, “Oh, it’s going to be a disaster.”
MR. BROOKS: Uh-huh.
MR. WOODWARD: I mean, you cite numbers which you have pulled out of the air of 10,000 dying. I mean, that’s—that—where does that come from?
MR. BROOKS: Well, A, it comes from John Burns. Second, it comes from the national intelligence...
MR. WOODWARD: Well, no, he doesn’t say 10,000.
MR. BROOKS: Well, no, no, but it talks about genocide.
MR. WOODWARD: Yeah.
MR. BROOKS: So I just picked that 10,000 out of the air.