Back in April, the release of the State Department’s annual report on global terrorism gave the administration much to cheer about. Armed with figures that showed a decline in terrorist attacks for 2003, the administration’s supporters claimed a great victory for the omnipresent War on Terrorism.

There was one tiny problem, though: The figures were wrong.

In fact, the terrorism numbers increased in 2003. Whoops. But at least the administration has someone who is becoming quite the expert at the whole mea culpa thing:

“I’m not a happy camper,” said Secretary of State Colin Powell when discussing the problematic report on Meet The Press. Banalities aside, when you look at the details of the terrorism report, it seems pretty obvious that this is more than a simple clerical error.

First of all, the report had a printing deadline of November 11, 2003…which, obviously, is over a month and a half before the year ended. So any terrorist attacks after the deadline (and there were several significant ones) didn’t get added into the report’s contents. Smart move, guys.

And the question needs to be asked�if the printing deadline was in November, why on earth did it take six months for the report to be released? Any competent printer (and I’ve worked for a few) can turn around a job like that in a week or two, which makes me think that the government is duplicating these things by using the “100 monkeys at 100 typewriters for 100 years” method.

Powell gamely denied that any political motivation was behind the faulty reports. Oh, of course not. Really. But lame excuses such as this fall flat at the highest levels of government; don’t they have any fact-checkers over there, or even someone who can read a $#@&ing calandar?

Oh. Wait. Nevermind.

“It was the best of times…it was the blurst of times?!? Stupid monkey!”