A couple of impressive numbers have been bounced around by various and sundry liberals over the last week or so: 90% and 642,000. And both those numbers have been “adjusted” substantially downward after a few people took a good look at them.

The first number — 90% — represented how many guns seized by Mexican officials in their ongoing drug war were traceable to the United States. This is the percentage Hillary Clinton cited in her recent criticism of our America-Mexico policy. This caused considerable consternation, leading Mexico to blame the U.S. for many of its problems and leading Obama administration officials to talk about tightening up gun laws here.

The figure seemed rather high to some gun experts who saw pictures of the captured weapons and thought, “I can’t get them here — how the heck are Mexican gangsters not only getting them in the U.S., but getting them across the border?”

Well, that number was — to put it kindly — fudged.

Let’s start at the beginning. Mexican officials seized 29,000 guns in 2007 and 2008. By the Obama administration’s reckoning, that would mean that 26,100 of them were from the U.S., right?

Not so fast.

Of those 29,000, the Mexicans determined that about 18,000 came from somewhere besides the U.S. Out of the remaining, only 5,114  were successfully linked back to the U.S.

The true statistic fell from 9 in 10 to roughly 1 in 6.

And those weren’t even the most dangerous weapons. Grenades? Fully automatic rifles? Rockets?  Those came from South Korea, China, Spain, Israel, the former Soviet bloc, other South American nations, and numerous other places.

As for the 642,000:  The Democratic National Committee collected petitions from Americans in support of President Obama’s grotesquely bloated budget, and delivered them to Capitol Hill. This was to represent some massive groundswell in favor of the plan — each and every member of Congress was presented with the signatures of their constituents.

And that’s where someone got clever. Each American has three representatives in Congress — their two Senators and their Representative. Well, the DNC didn’t want anyone to be missed, so they made three copies of each signature and delivered them to each member. And it was that total (642,000) that was reported as supporting the budget, not the 214,000 unique signatures.

There’s an old saying: figures don’t lie, but liars can figure. And these days, they can figure up a storm.