<p>Fundingfather, No you didn’t.</p>
<p>Mini, George Bush was in charge. He could have changed US policies.
He didn’t. Instead, he went full bore.
He didn’t say the democrats were full of ****.
He started a war in Iraq that wasn’t necessary.</p>
<p>Whatever Bill Clinton did or didn’t do, Bush got to choose.
We all saw what he chose.</p>
<p>What don’t you get?</p>
<p>They asked an ambiguous question which if you wanted to be technical about the answer, the corerect answer was yes, some WMDs were found (this I proved with the declassified statement). When you ask an ambiguous question you can’t do anything with the results other than use it to wrap dead fish.</p>
<p>If the polling people had asked me that question, I would also have responded Yes - knowing full well that that nothing of the magnitude talked about by Powell at the UN was ever discovered and the what was discovered was old pre-Gulf war stuff. But, indeed some were found so the answer to the question as asked was yes.</p>
<p>What was the UN doing all these years? In the 90’s…</p>
<p>Did the UN know they were looking for weapons that did not exist?</p>
<p>Fundingfather, they found weapons that didn’t work. That’s your definition of WMDs?</p>
<p>The rest of the stuff is a guess, an opinion.</p>
<p>That’s what Fox viewers thought when they said yes?</p>
<p>They based there answer of yes to this document? A document that proves nothing.</p>
<p>Show me where Fox viewers said yes because of this document.</p>
<p>dstark - that is precisely the point, the question was badly phrased. The existence of this document was broadcast on Fox so it is not too far-fetched that they were thinking of this when they answered the question.</p>
<p>If you want to have a good poll result, you better have a good poll question. In this case the question was phrased like it came from a high school intern (or someone with an agenda)</p>
<p>The references to “all the people in the world” in the survey got to me. I know, with absolute certainty, that I would have been a smart alec about that question if surveyed.</p>
<p>WMDs that don’t work are not WMDs. By definition.</p>
<p>Thinking WMDs may exist doesn’t make it true. By definition.</p>
<p>There is no fudge factor.</p>
<p>WMDs were not found.</p>
<p>The question wasn’t “is it your impression wmds may be found?”</p>
<p>“Since the war with Iraq ended, is it your impression that the US has or has not found Iraqi weapons of mass destruction?”</p>
<p>The answer is no.</p>
<p>dstark, what part of “chemical warfare agents remain hazardous and potentially lethal” and “Pre-Gulf War Iraqi chemical weapons could be sold on the black market” and “The possibility of use outside Iraq cannot be ruled out” do you not understand?</p>
<p>
By your interpretation of an ambiguous question the answer may well be “no” but another person taking a more precise view would (should) say “yes”.</p>
<p>If you don’t want ambiguous results, don’t ask ambiguous questions. However, I suspect that those who asked this question were not that informed themselves and were not even aware of what precisely was and was not found. Either that or they were intentionally wording the questions to be ambiguous to prove the point that they were after.</p>
<p>“dstark, what part of “chemical warfare agents remain hazardous and potentially lethal” and “Pre-Gulf War Iraqi chemical weapons could be sold on the black market” and “The possibility of use outside Iraq cannot be ruled out” do you not understand?”</p>
<p>Those were opinions. They were not facts.</p>
<p>You are right. you can answer this…</p>
<p>“Since the war with Iraq ended, is it your impression that the US has or has not found Iraqi weapons of mass destruction?”</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Your impression can be anything. </p>
<p>If you answered yes, your impression, based on whatever you want it to be based on, was wrong.</p>
<p>That’s the point.</p>
<p>Fox viewers, who answered yes, were wrong. Their impressions, no matter what they were based on ( and you have no proof it was based on that paper you posted), were wrong.</p>
<p>That is the point.</p>
<p>Were they wrong because of Fox or something else?
People who cite the survey are saying or implying it was Fox.
Was it Fox?</p>
<p>The question was not ambiguous.</p>
<p>Fundingfather, are you Bill Clinton? Are you arguing what is is?</p>
<p>"What was the UN doing all these years? In the 90’s…</p>
<p>Did the UN know they were looking for weapons that did not exist?"</p>
<p>That’s like asking whether public health officials looking for polio cases know that they don’t exist while they are looking for them.</p>
<p>The U.N. Weapons Inspectors didn’t find them. Clinton then decided to infiltrate the weapons inspections teams with CIA agents, and was found out within a year. He and Tenet then concocted the Big Lie (was Hillary in on it?) and sold it to the “experienced Democrats”. The U.N. weapons inspectors refused to confirm the Big Lie. Then Clinton kicked the U.N. weapons inspectors out of Iraq, and bombed the bejessus out of the country. They didn’t return until 2002. Any statement by U.N. inspectors between 1998 and 2002 is based on hearsay - they weren’t in the country.</p>
<p>All of the countries who believed the WMD story trace it to just two sources: the Clinton/Tenet Big Lie and to “Curveball”. There was no independent intelligence.</p>
<p>“Fox viewers, who answered yes, were wrong.”</p>
<p>From the data presented, how do you know that any Fox viewers answered yes and if so, how many?</p>
<p>Fundingfather - aside from the fact that the document you refer to was published three years after the survey, and refers to events which occurred one year after the survey - there is no rational reason to believe that the people responding to the PIPA survey failed to understood the question correctly, and answered it accurately according to their understanding of the facts, which was, in many cases, simply wrong. In fact, if you track the surveys over time, the number of people (in every category) who were misinformed declined month by month, as the reality dawned on more of them. Your tortured effort to fit that square peg into the round hole doesn’t change that - it just exposes your willingness to elevate ideology over reason, and I’m pretty sure that you’re the only one who doesn’t see that clearly. </p>
<p>Zoosermom - I think what you’re not getting here is that the surveys included questions regarding the political affiliation and primary news source of each respondent, along with their substantive responses. Each questionnaire was cross-referenced between the answers, so the number of Fox/Democrats answering a question a certain way could be determined, as well as the number of CBS/Republicans, etc.</p>
<p>There was a series of studies, and the specific set of results I reviewed (years ago) I can’t find now. (I think it was May or June, 2003) That one had the beliefs about WMD’s being found broken down by various categories, i.e., Republican/Fox, Republican/ABC, Republican/print, Republican/NPR (yes, there were some) etc. Republicans skewed higher than Democrats or independents in terms of misinformation, and Fox viewers skewed higher than those with other sources of information, but the only category which was above 50% was Republicans who got most of their information from Fox News, which (as I recall) was in the neighborhood of 56%.</p>
<p>“The U.N. Weapons Inspectors didn’t find them.”</p>
<p>The UN didn’t find them. For years and years. They were never going to find them. Yet, they were going to look to the end of time?</p>
<p>The UN reminds me of the Claude Reins character in Casablanca.
Just playing the game.
Complicit.</p>
<p>"What was the UN doing all these years? In the 90’s…</p>
<p>Did the UN know they were looking for weapons that did not exist?"</p>
<p>That’s like asking whether public health officials looking for polio cases know that they don’t exist while they are looking for them.</p>
<p>So the UN did not know whether the weapons existed or not? But Bill Clinton did know the weapons did not exist? Or is it possible he really believed the weapons existed? </p>
<p>The Hillary mention says more about you than her. We have no idea what kind of involvement she had in 1998. She was a little mad at Bill at that time. :)</p>
<p>“Each questionnaire was cross-referenced between the answers, so the number of Fox/Democrats answering a question a certain way could be determined, as well as the number of CBS/Republicans, etc.”</p>
<p>I ask you again how a lay person (me) could determine who answered what from the data presented?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Red Face Alert
kluge, you are correct on that. The timing of the report versus the study does indeed invalidate my objections to it. However, were the study to be done today and worded in the same way, I would make my same objections and only someone willing “to elevate ideology over reason” would disagree with me.</p>
<p>Zoosermom, these days it’s pretty standard for the responses to surveys to be entered into a database from which the correlations between different answers can be determined, that is, if there are 30 questions, most surveys are designed so that you can tell how many people answered yes to questions 6 and 23, not just the total number who answered yes to question 6 and how many answered yes to question 23. Is that the part you’re having trouble with?</p>
<p>FF: No, everyone who isn’t wearing aluminum foil hat linings would disagree with you.</p>
<p>Oh God…fundingfather…</p>
<p>What does “Oh God…fundingfather…” mean?</p>