Majority of Americans Now Question Justification for Iraq War [horse hockey alert]

intellectualconservative.com ^ | 11 July 2003 | David T. Pyne

[RedBloodedAmerican]

Change your sceedname to Mike4Terrorism, please.

[savedbygrace]

OK, I found the actual poll, and it seems Pyne is stretching the truth in the way he's reporting this.

The poll can be found here: http://www.pipa.org/

Here is the poll question/results:

Was Administration Fully Truthful on WMD?

Is it your impression that when the US government presented evidence of Iraq having weapons of mass destruction to justify going to war with Iraq, it was:

Presenting evidence they knew was false (10%)
Stretching the truth, but not making false statements (52%)
Being fully truthful (32%)

"PIPA and Knowledge Networks conducted a nationwide poll of 1051 American adults over June 18-25, 2003. The margin of error for the full sample was plus or minus 3-3.5%, depending on whether the question was asked to the full sample or three-quarters of the sample. The poll was fielded using Knowledge Networks’ nationwide panel, which is randomly selected from the entire adult population and subsequently provided internet access. For more information about this methodology see page 13, or go to www.knowledgenetworks.com/ganp. Funding for this research was provided by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Ford Foundation."

[hoosiermama]

Better yet read DIck Morris's OFF WITH THEIR HEADS. First 30 pages very revealing!

[William McKinley]

http://www.pipa.org/OnlineReports/Iraq/june3_qnnaire.pdf

[deport]

Look who's still espousing his anti Bush articles...... and pushing the Democrat talking points...... Yep ol' Pyneeeee.......

Iraq Approval

---

CBS News Poll. July 8-9, 2003. N=753 adults nationwide. MoE ± 4 (total sample).
						.
"Do you approve or disapprove of the way George W. Bush is handling the situation with Iraq?"
		Approve	Disap- prove	Don't Know
		%	%	%
	7/03	58	32	10

---

The Gallup Poll. July 7-9, 2003. N=1,006 adults nationwide. MoE ± 3 (total sample).
						.
"Do you approve or disapprove of the way George W. Bush is handling the situation with Iraq?"

		Approve	Disap- prove	No Opinion
		%	%	%
	7/7-9/03	58	39	3

---

Pew Research Center for the People & the Press survey conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates. June 20-July 2, 2003. N=1,019 adults nationwide.
						.
"Do you think the U.S. made the right decision or the wrong decision in using military force against Iraq?"

		Right	Wrong	Don't Know
		%	%	%
	6/20 - 7/2/03	67	24	9

---

FOX News/Opinion Dynamics Poll. June 30-July 1, 2003. N=900 registered voters nationwide. MoE ± 3.
						.
"Do you approve or disapprove of the job George W. Bush is doing handling the situation with Iraq?"
		Approve	Disap- prove	Not Sure
		%	%	%
	6/30 - 7/1/03	60	30	10

---

Job Approval

ABC News/Washington Post Poll. July 9-10, 2003. N=1,006 adults nationwide. MoE ± 3. Fieldwork by TNS Intersearch.

.

"Do you approve or disapprove of the way George W. Bush is handling his job as president?"
		Approve	Disap- prove	Don't Know
		%	%	%
	7/9-10/03	59	38	3

---

Ipsos-Reid/Cook Political Report Poll. July 8-10, 2003. N=764 registered voters nationwide. MoE ± 3.6.

.

"Overall, do you approve, disapprove or have mixed feelings about the way George W. Bush is handling his job as president?" If "mixed feelings" or not sure: "If you had to choose, do you lean more toward approve or disapprove?"
		Approve	Disap- prove	Mixed Feelings	Not Sure
		%	%	%	%		.
	7/8-10/03	60	38	1	-

---

CBS News Poll. July 8-9, 2003. N=753 adults nationwide. MoE ± 4.

.

"Do you approve or disapprove of the way George W. Bush is handling his job as president?"
		Approve	Disap- prove	Don't Know
		%	%	%
	7/8-9/03	60	32	8

[jimbo123]

A supporter of The Sink Fertilizer misrepresenting a poll? I'm shocked...

[Dane]

Talk is cheap, and worth nothing. Look at what bush does, not what he says

"Talk is cheap", ain't that the truth, especially with your non sensical rants.

What Bush has done is push through tax cuts, even in the wake of a divided Senate, has saddam hussein either dead or on the run giving orders to an ever dwindling cadre of supporters, kept the heat on with his judicial nominations, even with Tommy Daschle's throwing away over 200 years of Senatorial precedent not to filabuster judicial nominnees, and etc. etc.

Whatever H2Ostraat, I am basically done trying to debate with you, IMO, you are a malcontent and will never ever be happy and in accordance will never be on my side or anyone elses side for that matter.

Your "matter" is always to be miserable.

[savedbygrace]

Here's what Pyne wrote:

According to a poll conducted last week by the University of Maryland, 52 percent of Americans believe the Bush administration either "stretched the truth" about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction or told outright lies.

That statement isn't supported by the poll question and results obtained. The poll question specifies that the Bush administration is NOT lying. Therefore, Pyne is lying.

[William McKinley]

I like this question.

Is it your impression that when the US government presented the evidence to justify going to war with Iraq, it was being misleading or not being misleading?

Being misleading: 42%
Not being misleading: 53%
(No answer): 5%

[savedbygrace]

See #68. Pyne isn't just misrepresenting. He's lying.

[savedbygrace]

So, Pyne is lying.

Next!

[William McKinley]

Yep. He could have, and should have, written it more accurately as thus:

According to a poll conducted last week by the University of Maryland, 52 percent of Americans believe the Bush administration either "stretched the truth but was not making false statements" about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction or told outright lies.

But instead, he was just being an echo chamber for the mainstream liberal media.

As a matter of fact, I just took a poll of people sitting in front of my computer, and found that an overwhelming majority (100%) believe that Pyne was either "lying like a flea infested carpet" or being misleading.

[William McKinley]

I'd rather us solve it without legislation, by shouting down the media when it lies, by voting with our audience for media that doesn't lie, and by voting against the primary suppliers of political lies- the Democrats.

[William McKinley]

And until then, you will take a look at people like Kucinich. LOL

[Nick Danger]

I can sympathize with the general-case thrust of this guy's argument. The occasional Hitler aside, I'm not a big fan of having U.S. troops running around the world playing Superman, righting the world's wrongs. And I absolutely do not want us to get into the business of invading other countries to steal their minerals or whatever.

When we come to the specific case of Iraq, however, things are a lot messier than that.

I am amazed that so many people are willing to hang their hats on the proposition that there was no significant threat there. Maybe I'll agree with them in another three years. But if we haven't found Saddam Hussein's most closely-guarded military secrets after three whole months of looking, I am not surprised. The discovery of a uranium-enrichment centrifuge under a rose bush in some guy's back yard — with him telling us that he was told to hide it there — gives us just a hint of what we are up against. Here's Hans Blix to tell us he checked all the big buildings with smokestacks and storage tanks, and he didn't find a thing. How many back yard rose bushes did he dig up? That might be what we're looking at to find this stuff.

This author, like so many others, ignores the Second Law of Decisionmaking Under Uncertainty. We can't know for a fact what a dictator in a foreign country with seven layers of ever-more-secret police might be doing down in his dungeons. That's reality. We have to guess.

Rule One is, we try to put probabilities on the nature of the threat and its potential size. Might he have smallpox? Might he have anthrax? How close might he be to having one or more nuclear weapons? We take what we do know (he gassed the Kurds, he gassed the Iranians, the UN put 550kg of yellow cake uranium he had collected into a locked warehouse) and we make educated guesses. If he had 40,000 tons of Liquid Death in 1997, how many tons might he have now? There's no certainty to any of this.

The second-guessers and the Magoos with 40/40 hindsight (we haven't found the WMD's in 3 months, ergo they do not exist) have a field day with this stuff. "See that? He was wrong. In fact he probably lied on purpose."

Not so fast. There's Rule Two. Rule Two says, "probabilities aside, what are the penalties for making a mistake, one way or the other?"

The probability of Lightning Nag winning the 6th at Pimlico are pretty small, but the penalty for making a mistake by betting on her can be as low as $2, and in any case we control the size of our own mistake.

The penalty for making a mistake about whether Saddam Hussein has a nuclear weapon and a deal with Osama bin Laden to deliver it to midtown Manhattan is a million dead and worldwide economic chaos. Even if the probability of that is very low, we might act against it anyway.

I think we had something like that situation here, and too many of these critics are ignoring that. What American wants the President of the United States to sit in the White House and take serious risks with million-dead strikes against the American people? How cavalier of these yahoos to say, "Well, it didn't happen, so there was no reason to make sure it wasn't going to happen." They'd be the first ones hollering "Bush knew!" if New York City was today a radioactive ruin.

The days when we could afford to wait for the other guy to hit us first, so that we could look like gentlemen, are fading fast. When the other guy's first punch is a nuke to the Capitol, or smallpox in Texas, it's insane to give him the chance to strike first.

It's a puzzle. We have this happen every day, on a small scale, when police shoot a guy who looked like he was raising a gun. Sometimes it is a gun. Sometimes it's a cell phone. Do we really expect the cop to wait to find out the hard way that it was a gun? That's not reality.

And neither is the idea that the strikes on 9/11 do not alter the variables in the penalty-for-a-mistake equations concerning possession of deadly gasses and germs. The appearance of a willing and well-funded delivery system for covert attacks with these weapons changes the game forever. In any war between a guy with a gun, and a guy with a bullet-proof vest, bet on the guy with the gun. If the guy with the vest really wants to live, he needs to go get his own gun, and shoot first if he gets the chance.

[Pokey78]

The current WP poll:

All in all, considering the costs to the United States versus the benefits to the United States, do you think the war with Iraq was worth fighting, or not?

              Worth      Not worth     No
             fighting     fighting   opinion
7/10/03        57           40         3

[deport]

METHODOLOGY
The poll was fielded by Knowledge Networks, a polling, social science, and market research firm in Menlo Park, California, with a randomly selected sample of its large- scale nationwide research panel. This panel is itself randomly selected from the national population of households having telephones and subsequently provided internet access for the completion of surveys (and thus is not limited to those who already have internet access). The distribution of the sample in the web-enabled panel closely tracks the distribution of United States Census counts for the US population on age, race, Hispanic ethnicity, geographical region, employment status, income, education, etc.

The panel is recruited using stratified random-digit- dial (RDD) telephone sampling. RDD provides a non-zero probability of selection for every US household having a telephone. Households that agree to participate in the panel are provided with free Web access and an Internet appliance, which uses a telephone line to connect to the Internet and uses the television as a monitor. In return, panel members participate in surveys three to four times a month. Survey responses are confidential, with identifying information never revealed without respondent approval. When a survey is fielded to a panel member, he or she receives an e-mail indicating that the survey is available for completion. Surveys are self-administered.

For more information about the methodology, please go to: www.knowledgenetworks.com/ganp

[hoosiermama]

Morris goes into great detail exactly HOW the NYT skewed their polls. Wonder how many others use the same techniques?

If you haven't read it, do!

[deport]

The poll was conducted with a nationwide sample of 1,051 respondents June 18-25. The margin of error was plus or minus 3-3.5%, depending on whether the question was administered to the whole sample or three quarters of the sample.

The poll was fielded by Knowledge Networks using its nationwide panel, which is randomly selected from the entire adult population and subsequently provided internet access. For more information about this methodology, go to www.knowledgenetworks.com/ganp.

Funding for this research was provided by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Ford Foundation.

---

Q1. Overall, how would you rate President Bush’s leadership in dealing with international problems and issues?
Very strong leadership (+2) ........................ 26%
Somewhat strong leadership (+1) .................35
Neither strong nor weak (0) ..........................19
Somewhat weak leadership (-1) ...................10
Very weak leadership (-2).............................10
(No answer)..................................................... -

Q2. How would you rate President Bush’s leadership in dealing with the following international problems and issues?
Q2a. The Israel-Palestinian conflict
Very strong leadership (+2) ......................... 14%
Somewhat strong leadership (+1) .................32
Neither strong nor weak (0) ..........................33
Somewhat weak leadership (-1) ...................11
Very weak leadership (-2)...............................8
(No answer).....................................................2

Q2b. The situation in Iraq
Very strong leadership (+2) ......................... 35%
Somewhat strong leadership (+1) .................30
Neither strong nor weak (0) ..........................16
Somewhat weak leadership (-1) ...................10
Very weak leadership (-2)...............................9
(No answer).....................................................1

[PhiKapMom]

Who is this idiot Pyne and why is his article posted on Free Republic?

We have enough lies from the Mainstream media without going out and finding some suspect source for articles.

Is this guy a Libertarian? They give conservatives a bad name!