If You Don't Have Anything Nice To Say...

...make something up.

Once again John Kerry reminds us that you should never let the truth stand in the way of making an asinine argument.

On NBC's Today Show, in re Bush's education initiatives outlined in the State of the Union Address (as transcribed by Drudge):

KERRY: That's terrific. But 53 percent of our children don't graduate from high school. Kids don't have after-school programs... He didn't ask America to sacrifice anything to achieve great goals and the biggest example is making the tax cut permanent for the wealthiest people in America. The average American struggles to find time to take carry of families, working two or three jobs... It's a disgrace. He did not tell the real state of the union.

According to National Center for Education Statistics, the high school graduation rate currently stands at nearly 75% (measured as the number of new graduates as a percentage of all 17-year-olds).  What's more, this figure has risen consistently during Bush's Presidency.

Class	Grad %
2001	71.1
2002	72.2
2003	74.7
2004	74.9

Source: NCES Table 102 (Excel)

And those figures are likely to understate the real high school attainment rates, as the denominator used (population age 17) will be overstated, as many of a given year's new graduates will be a number of years older, and those graduates would have had smaller respective population bases (assuming positive population growth).  So the percentage of current 17-year-olds that will eventually graduate from high school should be higher still.

Indeed, the Census Bureau (Excel) shows that the high school attainment rate in 2004 for all Americans was 79.6%.

Further inspection of the Census table mentioned above makes me wonder if Kerry is cherry picking the 53.8% number representing "High School Graduate or Higher - 15 to 24 Years", which will obviously be a lower number as a third of the sample set is younger than typical graduation age.

(Actually, the 79.6% figure includes the 15- and 16-year-olds too, so even that number will be too low.)

Pessimism, for all its ill consequences, is typically rooted in a cynical or overly negative evaluation of actual *facts*.  Here, Kerry makes a heroic leap by incorporating pure fiction into his maligning of the President's policies.

Impressive.

Video at Michelle Malkin and Expose the Left.
Generation Why has a different theory on where Kerry got his figure.