But I know you won't take my word for it. So read this.
Yesterday, we found out that American support for U.S. participation in the Iraq war is rising.
One poll last week (Sept. 12-13) found that 51 percent of Americans back “the U.S. war in Iraq.” That's the first majority for the war since October 2003. A slightly newer (Sept. 15-17) poll showed that, for the first time since last December, less than a majority of Americans believe the Iraq war was a mistake.
In other words, our role in the Iraq war is increasingly popular.
And there are even some great examples of some - this is going to be astonishing - misleading news media reports about the War.
Read the whole thing.
(Photo copyright AP)
Of course we must consider the source. And the timing. It's a Fox News poll. You know, the GOP TV News Network. And, from the Fox poll story:
Actually, it's two polls. The FoxNews poll from last week, and the USAToday/CNN poll from this week. Although the latter words the question the a little differently, they've still seen improvement on that question from poll-to-poll.
Outfoxed,
You seemed to have conveniently overlooked the following in the originating post:
"Now the new USA Today-Gallup poll comes up with a finding similar to Fox News-Opinion Dynamics'."
I suppose USA Today and Gallup are also just tools of the GOP media machine, right?
You're contributing to the widening partisan division you cite in your own comment.
"The partisan division continues to be extreme, with 82 percent of Republicans saying they approve of the president's job performance compared to just 12 percent of Democrats."
Which makes the election very important.
I read this today - Michael Novak at the NRO:
"We are testing whether what bin Laden said six years ago is true Ӡthat people around the world see the difference between a strong horse and a weak horse, and will passionately side with the first, and have contempt for the other.
Opponents of the war in Iraq may opine that it has no relation to the war on terror, and that our retreat from Iraq will even help us in the war on terror.
Their views may be honorable, but our enemies have declared Iraq to be the decisive battlefield. That makes it so.
And if we had to choose a single battlefield in the region at which to bait our enemies, Iraq is by far one of the two best. But whatever the strategic reasons for choosing Iraq, the reality today is that our enemies have taken the bait. Destroyed there, they will be humiliated, and enter the next decade the contemptible weak horse that they have unrealistically dreamed that others might be."
I agree - America must be the strong horse - we cannot lose in Iraq.
It is nice to know that the Iraq war is becoming more popular in the USA because it is becoming much less popular in Iraq as we hold thousands of 'enemy combantants' even the Iraq government wants us to quite doing this.
Source?
it's fun to be popular
NG article this week was the source, Gordy
Must have been an AP story. If anyone else has a link to it, please let me know.
Gordy---Front page, center, top, Monday 9/18 NG by Patrick Quinn, AP writer tittled "Legal Vacuum".
Here it is.
I'm not sure where in that article you saw evidence that the war "is becoming much less popular in Iraq as we hold thousands of ”Ëœenemy combantants' even the Iraq government wants us to quite doing this."
There's some quotes from some Iraqi ministers, and a civilian or two. I'm not arguing with you, as I know that you got the impression the AP wanted you to get from that story, but I don't see how you can extrapolate from this story the growing unpopularity of the war in the entire country.
I my popularity comment regarding our holding of enemy combantants started at this point in the article:
Meanwhile, officials of Nouri al-Maliki's 4-month-old Iraqi government say the U.S. detention system violates Iraq's national rights.
"As long as sovereignty has transferred to Iraqi hands, the Americans have no right to detain any Iraqi person," said Fadhil al-Sharaa, an aide to the prime minister. "The detention should be conducted only with the permission of the Iraqi judiciary."
At the Justice Ministry, Deputy Minister Busho Ibrahim told AP it has been "a daily request" that the detainees be brought under Iraqi authority.
I don't see how you get from that quote to the war "is becoming much less popular in Iraq as we hold thousands of ”Ëœenemy combantants' even the Iraq government wants us to quite doing this.”ÂÂ
That quote has nothing to do with the popularity or unpopularity of the war in the minds of Iraq as a whole. There's no polling, no surveys, nothing.
I'm not saying it's not causing the war to become more unpopular. It's just that there's nothing in this article that provides evidence that it's doing so.
Your 900 person poll tells me nothing about the popularity of the Iraqi war with Americans. Let's see 900 over the number of eligible voters in this country. How many zeros would that be? In my statictics class, the prof would have said this is not valid.
At least this article shows dissatisfaction for elected Iraqi leadership with the USA on the issue of 3000 plus enemy combantants.
Yes I inferred the war was becoming less popular with Iraqi's as the quotes were from their elected leaders.
"Your 900 person poll tells me nothing about the popularity of the Iraqi war with Americans. Let's see 900 over the number of eligible voters in this country. How many zeros would that be? In my statictics class, the prof would have said this is not valid."
OK, so your position is that polling is not a valid way to discern the popularity or unpopularity of something?
"At least this article shows dissatisfaction for elected Iraqi leadership with the USA on the issue of 3000 plus enemy combantants. Yes I inferred the war was becoming less popular with Iraqi's as the quotes were from their elected leaders."
And your position is that asking elected leaders about something and then inferring something unrelated from their responses is more valid than polling? What would your statistics professor say about that?
Elected leaders, I might add, who wouldn't be elected leaders if the War in Iraq had never happened.
Yahoooooooooo! I love the war, it's fun, it makes us so popular world wide, and makes us so safe! Plus, reading about all those killings!
It's more popular than American Idol!
Popular?
Shame on all of you for even considering a war by "popularity" of the people.
Uh. OK.
War is a political act. Especially in a Republic, political acts are impacted by popularity.
I don't feel ashamed at all that we're discussing this.
Don't argue with Gordy. He's always right. Always. Always Always.
I thought I was wrong once.
But I was mistaken.
;-)
If popularity shapes policy, ("political acts are impacted by popularity) why are we still in Iraq? It's below 50% and has been way below 40%.
I recall you taking a different position on "unpopularity" not too long ago.
To paraphrase, "damn the torpedos, full speed ahead".
If popularity falls, it's the MSM and lefty libs, if popularity rises, it's hooray for the war, the public now knows.
Hmpf.
"If popularity shapes policy, (”ÂÂpolitical acts are impacted by popularity) why are we still in Iraq?"
Because the Presidency isn't up for election until 2008, and this President doesn't care how unpopular this War gets. If you think popularity/unpopularity of this War hasn't impacted the American political scene for this year's elections, I don't know how to convince you. The stories are everywhere, from Joe Lieberman to talk of Democrat tidal wave.
I sure hope you are right. I hope it has a huge impact on the midterms. I hope for a clear Democratic majority in the Senate, and a 2/3 majority in the House.
Then we can get out of this stupid jingoist war started by the blueblood cowboy, and then we can take care of getting rid of him, his shot-gunning veep, and his psychotic Sec'y of Defense.
I wish the same for them as what Ken Lay got.
I am so angry at this clown in the White House I will never vote for a Republican again, all the way down to Jerry Schweighart. And if you look, I am, or was, a hard R, the hardest of Rs, hard R exclusively since the '70s.
That's MY popular vote. George the Fool has thrown away an R you could count on.
His economic policies ,his environmentalpolicies, NCLB, his complete lack of understanding about national disasters, his lies, and more.
That felt good. Maybe being a D is the feel good party for a reason.
Question about poll reliability:
In the previous post, I referenced a poll showing Blagojevich over Topinka by 30. You dismissed the poll results, saying that 400 isn't a reasonable sample size to represent the state of Illinois. On what grounds, then, is 900 (or for that matter, 1003) people a reasonable sample size for the United States (which, last I checked, is significantly more than twice the size of IL)?
In any case, I don't see the war continuing to become more popular, especially seeing as the war on the ground is not improving in any significant way.
Jon O.,
If there had been two Illinois polls (even with a sample of 400) showing JBT down 30, I would have had more faith in them. As you can see, today's Survey USA has JBT down 6, with a larger sample size and a better reputation.
I wouldn't have believed the Iraq War thing if there hadn't been two polls illustrating the trend. Sometimes one poll is an anomaly (about 5% of polls are, due to natural errors). It's harder to dismiss two.
The Fox News polls are valid for the population that they sampled, but it is important to point out that these Fox results are based on a sample of likely voters rather than on a sample of the whole population (for details, see the details for the entire poll at http://www.foxnews.com/projects/pdf/FOX232_rls_web.pdf). Less than 40% of voting-age Americans vote in midterm elections (like the one that's coming in November), so the population of likely voters is demographically unrepresentative of the entire population.
The Fox results are somewhat different than other polls being done on Iraq using random national samples (rather than just sampling likely voters). The most important difference is that Fox does not seem to have established a trend for its question wording, which makes it difficult to know whether support is rising over time (because different wordings can produce different apparent levels of support). Comparing the Fox News poll results with those of other major national polling organizations (see http://www.pollingreport.com/iraq.htm for such polls, including Gallup's) suggests that likely voters are relatively more positive toward Iraq than the country as a whole.
That said, there does seem to be a slight upturn in support for Iraq registering in other nationwide polls, and in one case--the latest USA Today/Gallup poll--a standard measure of support for Iraq is registering 49% support. But a close look at the trends over time shows that (1) this movement is within the poll's sampling error and (2) it is not all that different from regular fluctuations in levels of support for the Iraq war over the past year.
Thanks, Prof. Althhaus. Prof. Althaus taught one of my favorite PolySci classes of all time - Politics and the Media - way back when I was an undergrad.
You might want to go over your old notes again Gordy, believe less in what Rush says and watch a little less FOX.
Why? Prof. Althaus isn't disagreeing with anything I wrote.
Plus, I don't watch Fox - or any other TV news, for that matter. And Rush is just for background noise during the day.
The pollsters ought to be asking toddlers about the popularity of the war, since they're the ones who are going to be laboring under extortionate tax rates to pay for it. Big-screen TVs and hot tubs would be very popular too if we all knew we were going to die before the Visa bill showed up.
Gordy, I was teaching it, but you're doing it--great job with creating a public forum for discussing important local and national issues.
"DILBERT OF THE DAY; THE KEY TO HAPPINESS IS SELF-DELUSION" p. 350, Fiasco. Ricks. Thomas, E. 2006 A very interesting, current book, on the Iraq War. You might find it worth your while.
"Dilbert of the Day: The key to happiness is self deception", 'Fiasco' by Thomas E., p. 206. 2006. This new book may be well worth your time in reading.
Gordy's right! The Iraq Was is widely popular. Especially among terrorists.
:roll:
Interesting what a difference a couple of days makes:
http://dni.gov/press_releases/Declassified_NIE_Key_Judgments.pdf
what is the backstory of this photo?