Heavy reporting

James Taranto took the USAToday writer to task for the sloppy writing on the figures for overweight military yesterday, but today he says it wasn't enough--the article was even more poorly researched with speculative (i.e. anti-war) conclusions than he thought.

To begin with, the study contains nothing--zilch--to back up Zoroya's contention that the trend "since the start of the Iraq war" is "yet another example of stress and strains of continuing combat deployments." And a close look at it gives further reason to doubt [Gregg] Zoroya's linkage of the findings to the Iraq effort.

So who's chubbing out? The women, and the elders--just like the rest of the population. The Army and the Marines, the bulk of the Iraq troops, have the lowest rates of obesity. I guess the press will need to find another way to slam the troops. The prisoners on Gitmo got fat on good food, too--which will probably all change when they are sent home to "reeducation camps" and then loosed to come back to us, slim and trim.