3 of 4 Bush voters believe Iraq had WMD, al Qaeda ties

[Martin Eden]

Like their president, their beliefs are not based in reality. Facts are dismissed or ignored when they conflict with faith, whether in political or religious dogma.

Three of Four Bush Supporters Still Believe in Iraqi WMD, al Qaeda Ties

by Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON – Three out of four self-described supporters of President George W. Bush still believe that pre-war Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMD) or active programs to produce them and that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein provided “substantial support” to al Qaeda, according to a new survey released here Thursday.

Moreover, as many or more Bush supporters hold those beliefs today than they did several months ago, before the publication of a series of well-publicized official government reports that debunked both notions.

-------------------------------------------------

Remarkably, asked whether the U.S. should have gone to war with Iraq if U.S. intelligence had concluded that Baghdad did not have a WMD program and was not providing support to al Qaeda, 58 percent of Bush supporters said no, and 61 percent said they assumed that Bush would also not have gone to war under those circumstances.

-------------------------------------------------

Indeed, the only issue on which the survey found broad agreement between the two sets of voters was on the question of whether the Bush administration itself has been actively propagating the misconceptions about Iraq’s WMD and connections to al Qaeda.

much more:
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1022-01.htm

[Jack_Dawson]

1. 3 of 4 Bush supporters have a 2-digit IQ

:beer:

[librarycard]

15. They're the ones who watch FOX News

What a waste of time.

[Reverend_Smitty]

2. this just proves that 3 out of 4 Bush supporters

are complete idiots. Its polls like these that make me think that forced sterilization programs aren't such a bad thing after all!

[Oak2004]

4. No-- it proves two things

A) That ordinary working class folks, with high school educations, kids, and maybe even working two jobs, don't have the time, and possibly the resources, to get their news from hours of internet research. Instead, they see a few soundbites on television "news" as they're getting ready for bed, they hear a half-hour of right-wing ranting on the radio as they drive to and from work, and they hear about the world from the minister at their church. Exposed solely to deliberately misleading propaganda, they come to believe the falsehoods that they are fed.

B)The vast right wing conspiracy is real, of course -- but that's only half the story. The other half is that the left completely dropped the ball. The biggest error of the left is demonstrated in your reply: ever since the New Left discovered "hard hats" and "rednecks", most of the American left has openly despised ordinary working people.

Those ordinary working people, though ill informed, are not so stupid that they don't know that a great many liberals call them idiots and look down upon them. And they are not so sheeplike that they're going to line up in support of the people who think they're the scum of the earth.

So they left for the Republican Party. There, a cunning group of extremist propagandists who think no better of them than the left understood that in order to use people, you don't spit in your face. Ordinary Americans know no one in America speaks for them. But given a choice between the ones who spits in their face and openly proclaim they ought to be wiped from the earth, and the ones who pretend to treat them with dignity while stabbing them in the back, they'll line up behind the ones who treat them with dignity.

Yes, there are misled Americans. This research shows they're misled, not malevolent. If they knew the facts, they'd be with us, and the right would be exposed for what they are -- a tiny crazy minority. It is our duty as citizens to find a way to inform these people of the truth. If, instead, we choose to inflate our egos by gloating over our smarts and their stupidity, we are unfit to lead, unfit to govern, and unfit even to tie the shoes of our good-hearted but misled sisters and brothers.

[Skittles]

5. stop with the people "don't have time" bs

they have plenty of time to watch TV and do all sorts of nonsense. The fact is, most of those people choose to remain woefully ignorant.

[Oak2004]

7. Wake up: not everyone is as privileged as you are

Evidently you don't know enough people from the working class, because the claim that these people have the time and the means and are uniformly blessed with the ability to investigate what they hear about the world. Nor have you done much hard work, because you can't imagine what its like to come home so tired the only thing you can think of doing, once you deal with the urgent household things, is to sit and veg out in front of the tube (and, in a few minutes, probably fall asleep in front of it).

If this is your attitude towards our fellow citizens, why are you left of center? Surely it isn't to improve the quality of life of ordinary citizens, because you view ordinary Americans with deep contempt. And what do you think is the role of political activists? It can't be to educate and organize and mobilize people, because you evidently believe that that kind of thing is an individual's private personal responsibility.

This kind of attitude reminds me exactly why I'm a liberal Republican in exile from my party, and not a Democrat.

[Skittles]

8. you are unbelieveably wrong and condescending

I was in the military when I was 18, have worked shift work for 25 years and I currently work 12 hour shifts at night. I live in Texas and the people I work with will vote for Bush. They couldn't tell you who their reps in Congress are but they can talk about "reality TV shows" for half the night.

[Oak2004]

9. Do you know that privilege comes in more forms than money?

What made me different from my fellow drivers, most of whom were not as knowledgeable as myself, back when I driving commercially and not driving a wheelchair?

Most of them hovered in the average to slightly below average range of intelligence: I've got no more than a high school diploma, but my IQ is around 135. I didn't do anything to earn that IQ. I inherited a small fortune in smart genes, and they didn't.

Why did I think to question what I heard from the mass media? In my young impressionable days, I came in contact with the civil rights movement. I did nothing to deserve this silver spoon experience: other kids like me knew of it only from pictures of burning cities on the TV set and overhearing the frightened, bitter, hateful conversations involving the n-word. My experience made me more suspicious of authorities, and led me to demand from them a higher level of proof; the experience of most of my fellows led them to suspect dissenters.

I inherited another privilege I didn't earn. My grandfather was a powerful figure within the Chicago Democratic political machine. He died when I was still quite young, and by becoming an anti-Daley liberal Republican I didn't benefit in any of the usual ways from my family history. But what I saw, at an impressionable age, was that an individual can make an impact on public policy. I believe that I have power. My fellow drivers, from their experiences, came away believing that nothing they did would make much difference at all.

What makes you different? How much of your difference is ultimately rooted in pure unearned luck, and not hard work?

If you broke into the home of any of your Bush-supporting fellow workers and tried to take thousands of dollars worth of their property and max out their credit cards, I'll bet none of them would respond lazily or indifferently. If you randomly kidnapped their children to work at your gas station, held them for a few years, terrorized them, and from time to time lopped off a few limbs or shot a few of their kids dead, I'd bet not a single one of them wouldn't work like mad to stop you. Nobody in their right mind doesn't care about these things.

Now you and I know that that's exactly what Bush and Cheney are doing to them and to the rest of us. But your fellow workers don't know this, otherwise they'd be acting like sane people do when they're threatened.

What's worse, they don't know that they don't know. And if you don't know that you don't know, you won't even try to find anything out. Even if they do keep their eyes open through the latest reality TV hit (something neither I nor many of my friends would have been capable of during our work weeks, nothing my home health workers can do (one told me today that she gets all her news from talking to her clients), yet something many times less strenuous than researching public policy), they don't know they ought to be keeping their eyes open for something else. Besides they've seen what the authoritative sources are saying, and what their neighbors are telling them, and not one of them has told them anything that would make them think that they ought to question what's going on. Sure there's this character at work, but what did they learn from their family and school but not to be swayed by odd people like that? Besides, even if they did want to change things, what could they actually accomplish, other than invite retaliation from the powers that be?

None of the above makes these people inferior to you or me or anyone else. It does make them ignorant, in an especially tenacious way.

So what are our options? We can

A) enlist in a latter day khmer rouge and try to kill everyone we deem to be tenaciously ignorant
B) Give up
C) just as tenaciously try to educate these kind of people.

I submit that only the last option is moral.

Or in other words: It is our duty as citizens to find a way to inform these people of the truth

And I've never once seen anyone respond well to being treated with contempt. If we intend to do our duty, we need to lose the contempt.

No one is unreachable, no matter how tenaciously ignorant someone seems to be. Back when I was organizing on the southwest side of Chicago, I even befriended a bona fide card carrying Marquette Park American Nazi, and persuaded him of the error of his ways.

[Skittles]

10. you know nothing about me

stop assuming I am "privileged". I live in an apartment, drive a ten-year old car. I was raised by a mentally ill father who committed suicide. He was in the military and I moved 13 times before I was in high school. I didn't have the money to attend college and have worked since I was 15.

And my coworkers know exactly what a freaking disaster Bush is - they simply put the interests of the repug party above the interests of America.

[NeoConsSuck]

25. Agreed.

Brain-dead TV shows like Fear Factor and Survivor have no trouble whatsoever filling their ratings. Who's watching these shows? Nobel prize winners?

No, it's the working class slob.

I work 2 jobs and have plenty of time keep informed. Priorities.

[nonconformist]

11. That's crap. We ARE the party of the working class.

WHAT do the Republican's bring to the table for the working class? Not a damn thing. I don't buy this "you've chased them all away with elitism" myth. My entire family is blue-collar working class Democrats.

If anything chased some of the working class away, I'd say that it has more to do with basing their vote on social conservatism and religion. The Republicans use this as their ace in the hole, their ultimate wedge issue. It suckers people into voting against their best interests.

[Skittles]

12. beware the "liberal republican"

we are privileged elitists who don't understand the "working class". AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA.

[turbo_satan]

3. Three out of four Bush supporters...

... could watch Bush fucking a baby goat on the South Lawn of the White House and still refuse to believe their own eyes.

These people are hopeless and I don't think it's possible to get through to them. Bush-worship is a religion and His devotees are afflicted with an ideological blindness that simply will not allow them to see what's so obvious to the rest of us.

[Seabiscuit]

29. Pretty much sums up the people who destroyed that audio ng.

:argh:

[FlyByNight]

6. These flat-earthers probably believe...

that the Sun still revolves around the Earth too. Such willful ignorance. Facts and evidence are simply discarded when in conflict with dogma.

[HamdenRice]

13. Great post Oak2004

I agree with most of what you wrote in your first post, although I am skeptical of any arguments about IQ and heredity.

What a lot of political junkies don't understand is that the vast majority of people, whether educated or uneducated, intelligent or unintelligent, really don't give a rat's ass about politics. I get sick of it myself sometimes.

Putting aside the whole dispute here about whether hardworking people have "time" to gather alternative information, I know a number of intelligent, college educated artists here in NYC, most in the east village artistic area of Manhattan who for years simply said, "I'm completely apolitical." To a lot of people, Washington is Hollywood for ugly people -- just a lot of jockying for popularity and ego gratification.

I also know a lot of people in Coney Island, one of the poorest neighborhoods in Brooklyn, who simply didn't care about politics. It doesn't mean they are stupid or intelligent. It's just that politics is irrelevant.

In my neighborhood in Queens, on the border with Long Island, people are a little more politically aware if only because they get a property tax bill four times a year, but other than that, politics is peripheral to most, but not all, people. I also live in the safest Congressional district in the country for our Democratic representative, so the very control of our party over politics here has a tendency to depoliticize people.

One reason that until the Bush administration, politics seemed irrelevant, was that the major news media presents it as a popularity contest, a horse race and a beauty pagent, rather than a forum for figuring out public policy. The so called scandals of the Clinton years, manufactured by the RW, confused a lot of people.

The media confuses objectivity with equal time. To any rational objective person, the Iraq war is a disaster. Objectivity means independently and fair mindedly looking at the facts and coming to conclusions regardless of one's own self-interest. An equal time approach, favored by the corporate media, is to allow a critic of the war to explain why the war is a disaster, and then allow a Bush administration official liar to give his side -- blatant lies about how there are so many good things going on that you the viewer cannot see. The viewer is left with two completely contradictory pieces of information/disinformation -- and so throws up his hands in frustration and says who can you trust? Meanwhile, the corporate media thereby contributes to the propogration of blatant lies and the turning off of the population to news, politics and public policy.

The left has indeed abdicated its responsibility of informing people. In the past, this was not done through the media but through organziations controlled by the left and working class itself -- the unions, the progressive churches, and the ward level organization of the political parties. All of these have withered. I remember the union rep coming to my parents home and training my mother to be a shop steward for non-professionals in the Board of Education, who in turn organized other schools. All the bullshit rhetoric in the world coming from city hall could not dissuade people from listening to the truth coming from the union. I also remember hearing about the civil rights movement on Sudays from my Baptist (African American) church, and when we visited the nice liberal white church nearby, hearing about Ceasar Chavez's movement to unionize farmworkers in California. Despite the corporate media, we stopped eating grapes, even if we weren't sure why we were doing so!

One thing that gives me hope is that regular, apolitical people are fired up about this election. I have met lots of people in the east village, Coney Island and here in Queens who are voting for the first time, and in my local pub, across the highway in Long Island, I have talked to a lot of republicans who are voting Democratic for the first time.

[Ardee]

22. Important point made....

The numbers of people who are turned off by the political process, as well as the numbers who vote for Bush, only signify a failure on the part of the opposition to educate them, to win them from the dark side, or to distinguish themselves from the Repugs in the minds of the voters...

It is useless to blame poor decision making by the voters when that only masks the real problems; namely that there really isn't a two party system here in America, hasn't been for a long time and wont be unless a third party rises to relevance.

A Queens guy huh? I grew up in Queens, went to Van Buren High School (with Mario Savio (trivia alert))and fled to Northern California after a stint at Michigan showed me life outside of NY was possible and favorable.

[LiberalAndProud]

14. Thinking people support Kerry.

Intentionally ignorant people shouldn't be allowed to vote. A minimum IQ should not be a prerequisite for voting, but voters should have to prove the they have made some attempt to arm themselves with facts.

But that isn't even a requirement for the presidency. I'm just being wistful.

[Ardee]

16. An interesting discussion

Last night a guest on Bill Maher's show, a former director of the CIA in fact, said that Hussein did indeed have ties to AlQaeda and that they were known for years. He went on to make a distinction between "operational" ties, which he stated Hussein did not have, and other sorts...just thought Id interject that.

That the vast majority of Americans are too busy living lives to be political junkies is obvious. That this inability to detect just how rancid our politicos have become is scary. Democracy simply doesn't work without an involved electorate, and 'involved' means a hell of a lot more than simply voting!

It is far to easy to castigate and denigrate those who will vote for Bush this cycle as ignorant or out of touch. These people are far from drooling idiots and are , by far, working folks who raise families, pay mortgages and are simply guilty of an inability to research what they are being told and of placing more trust in their elected officials than the facts would dictate they should.

It is simply counter productive to dismiss 48% of our fellow Americans out of hand, so where does that leave us? For me it leaves us with an admission that the failures of our fellow citizens and voters to fully understand the morass of international politics and domestic policies lies with the so-called "out" party....in this case it is the Democrats who should have been leading this educatory process and did not. I guess they were far too busy supporting the invasion of Iraq, the Homeland Security Act, the No Child Left UnScrewed bill and the like. After all what import is conscience in the face of dwindling campaign funds from the wealthy?

This is exactly why I have turned (in desperation mayhaps) to third party solutions to our abysmal situation.

[Martin Eden]

17. Good Posts, Oak2004, HamdenRice, Ardee

The vast majority of Bush voters are misinformed, not stupid.

It is very difficult to get people to listen to arguments that challenge their opinions or beliefs, and these efforts are severely compromised when they feel they are being treated with contempt by those who disagree with them.

It is easy for us to denigrate those who have fallen for the propaganda that permeates mainstream media, but unless we can effectively counter that misinformation we have little chance of changing America for the better. If we want these people to be our allies, we have to treat them with respect.

[Skittles]

19. I absolutely disagree

many people I know in Texas know damn well there were no ties between Saddam and 9/11 and no WMD have been found but THEY DON'T F***ING CARE. They will vote for that piece of shit Bush ANYWAY.

[Ardee]

23. not quite the point, Skittles

The point being that they are voting FOR Bush because something he stands for (or pretends to stand for) appeals to them. We simply cannot win the minds and hearts of voters by name calling and denigrating their choices. They will not vote for "our guy" until and unless we convince them that:

1. we are not uncivil assholes

2. we have a valid ,provable point to make

[AtTheEndOfTheDay]

18. I, not a Bush supporter, also believed their was some

because I still assumed the News wasn't BS. But I didn't believe it was necessary or appropriate to invade and do Bush's agenda even if. After growing up during the Cold War I can't imagine how a highly contained tin pot dictator was sold to the American public as a genuine threat. It just didn't ring true. My bullshit meter was firing full blast. Also I believed Scott Ritter. It all seems like a episode from Twilight Zone.

[HamdenRice]

20. Now I understand -- it's not ignorance, it's psychological

Last night I was at my local pub and had a conversation with three other people about the war -- two Bush supporters/republicans, a Kerry supporter/Democrat and myself.

One republican was the barmaid, who is almost comically committed to Bush -- that's her reputation.

The other Kerry supporter amazingly was a National Guardsman (African American) who was in Iraq for a year and thinks the invasion was a disaster and told us a lot about what it was like to be there.

The other republican was a firefighter who was at the WTC on 9/11.

At one point the firefighter says that after seeing the wreckage of the WTC we had to go after Sadam. The Guardsman and I both say Sadam had nothing to do with 9/11. He says he doesn't believe it. Then we both say that even president bush says that Sadam had nothing to do with 9/11. The firefighter gets that blank look that so many posters here at DU have talked about when confronting bush supporters with the facts. Then he mumbles again that he will always believe that Sadam was involved in 9/11 no matter what and walks out of the bar.

This conversation was the same day that I had posted in this thread earlier, and in a flash I completely understood these people we are talking about.

It is not an intelligence problem. It is not an information problem. It is a psychological problem called cognitive dissonance. They are not stupid at all.

Cognitive dissonance is the inability of people to process new information that conflicts with or is dissonant with what they think they already know. People will go to outrageous lengths to make new information "consonant" with what they know.

Here is the problem with bush supporters. If they accept that Sadam had nothing to do with 9/11 then they have to accept truly terrible, dissonant information: that the president is a lying incompetent, that over 1000 young Americans and countless Iraqis have died for absolutely nothing, that the country really is being run by a oil-gluttonous oligarchy, that the president's family is possibly in cahoots with the family of the worst mass murderer of Americans in history.

So they just black out the reality and hold onto the unreality. They are not stupid; they are doing what traumatized people do.

[underpants]

21. Yep-they also don't want to admit that they bought into the whole thing

People don't like being lied to, when they find out that they have (IF they face it) they do one of two things:
1.Turn on the liar
2.Ignore it as it would mean that they were wrong.

It isn't from being flooded with the message they are just scared to admit to themselves that they have been completely duped.

[Martin Eden]

24. In short, it's denial

In the wake of 9/11 many Americans formed a strong emotional bond with president Bush. They strongly identified with his religious faith and patriotic rhetoric, and trusted in his leadership. When he was criticized on any number of fronts -- but especially on the war in Iraq -- they rushed to his defense rather than inform themselves of the facts. And even when facts come out that blatantly contradict Bush's previous assertions, they latch onto the Republican spin because it reinforces their beliefs and reassures them they were right to place their trust in Bush and to continue trusting him.

What we are asking these people to do is to admit they were played for chumps -- that the man who is the supposed standard bearer of their faith, their patriotism, and the safety of their families has in fact lied to them, corrupted our nation's founding principles, and endangered them and their families.

It is extremely difficult for anyone to admit their belief has been built upon a pack of lies, and cognitive dissonance becomes a much more acceptable option than making such an admission -- especially when the people trying to persuade them have denigrated them or insulted their intelligence.

Certainly, I have encountered many people of the kind Skittles referred to -- they know the facts and nevertheless believe we should kill as many A-Rabs as we can and that liberal fags are the scourge of America. There is no reasoning with these people, but Bush supporters are not a monolithic block of this sort. If we give indulge our contempt for the other sort who are often our good neighbors and friends, they will continue to support the administration that continues to play them for chumps.

[DeadManInc]

26. Bush supporters

3 out of 4 Bush supporters still believe in Santa Claus, Tooth Fairy, Easter Bunny, and their emperor George the douchebag Bush!

[Jack Rabbit]

27. This proves what we at DU have always suspected

Most people who support Bush don't know what they're talking about.

[indepat]

28. You can fool some fools all the time

[indepat]

30. Most zealous ideologues and religious fanatics can be fooled all the time