{"id":8023,"date":"2006-07-25T11:11:41","date_gmt":"2006-07-25T15:11:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/8023.html"},"modified":"2006-07-25T11:11:41","modified_gmt":"2006-07-25T15:11:41","slug":"lingering-confusion-over-wmd","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/lingering-confusion-over-wmd\/","title":{"rendered":"Lingering confusion over WMD?"},"content":{"rendered":"

This item<\/a>, from today’s Washington Times, has to be wrong.<\/p>\n

Half of Americans now say [tag]Iraq[\/tag] had [tag]weapons of mass destruction[\/tag] when the United States invaded the country in 2003 — up from 36 percent last year, a [tag]Harris[\/tag] [tag]poll[\/tag] finds. Pollsters deemed the increase both “substantial” and “surprising” in light of persistent press reports to the contrary in recent years.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

To be sure, those are the actual results from the poll. The new Harris poll really did find<\/a> that 50% of U.S. adults believe that Iraq had [tag]WMD[\/tag] when the U.S. launched an invasion over three years ago. And this isn’t one of those Harris Interactive polls that are conducted online — according to the summary, this was a telephone poll conducted earlier this month with a decent sample size.<\/p>\n

Was the wording of the question confusing? Not really. The poll read a series of statements and asked poll respondents to say whether they believe the statement is true or not true. Presented with “Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when the U.S. invaded,” 50% said the statement was true — up from 36% in a Harris poll conducted in February 2005.<\/p>\n

I’m going to have to assume that the poll is simply wrong. It’s just not possible that, after all of these years, 50% of the country believes there were WMD in Iraq, and that number has gone up<\/i> over the last year.<\/p>\n

Sure, our leaders have lied about the issue<\/a>. And sure, there’s widespread confusion about reality among Fox News viewers<\/a>. But that still doesn’t explain a result like this one.<\/p>\n

If there’s a rational explanation for such widespread ignorance, I’m anxious to hear it. The more likely answer is that the poll is some kind of bizarre outlier, right? Right<\/em>?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This item, from today’s Washington Times, has to be wrong. Half of Americans now say [tag]Iraq[\/tag] had [tag]weapons of mass destruction[\/tag] when the United States invaded the country in 2003 — up from 36 percent last year, a [tag]Harris[\/tag] [tag]poll[\/tag] finds. Pollsters deemed the increase both “substantial” and “surprising” in light of persistent press reports […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8023","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8023","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8023"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8023\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8023"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8023"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8023"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}