{"id":8139,"date":"2006-08-07T12:31:14","date_gmt":"2006-08-07T16:31:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/8139.html"},"modified":"2006-08-07T12:31:14","modified_gmt":"2006-08-07T16:31:14","slug":"asking-why-people-become-independent-of-reality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/asking-why-people-become-independent-of-reality\/","title":{"rendered":"Asking why people become ‘independent of reality’"},"content":{"rendered":"

About two weeks ago, Harris released a poll<\/a> that still has the political world confused. The pollster found that half the country believes that Saddam Hussein’s government had weapons of mass destruction when the U.S. invaded in 2003 — a marked increase over the last year.<\/p>\n

I still have to believe that the results are some kind of cruel mistake, intended to drive the reality-based community batty, but as long as the poll continues to puzzle nearly everyone, the AP had an interesting analysis<\/a> of what led to such an odd polling outcome.<\/p>\n

[E]xperts see a raft of reasons why: a drumbeat of voices from talk radio to die-hard bloggers to the Oval Office, a surprise headline here or there, a rallying around a partisan flag, and a growing need for people, in their own minds, to justify the war in Iraq.<\/p>\n

People tend to become “independent of reality” in these circumstances, says opinion analyst Steven Kull. […]<\/p>\n

“I’m flabbergasted,” said Michael Massing, a media critic whose writings dissected the largely unquestioning U.S. news reporting on the Bush administration’s shaky WMD claims in 2002-03. “This finding just has to cause despair among those of us who hope for an informed public able to draw reasonable conclusions based on evidence,” Massing said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Indeed, it does. But what’s just as startling is the number of conservatives who believe the poll results are encouraging<\/i> because of all the WMDs Iraq had in 2003.
\n<\/p>\n

Timing may explain some of the poll result. Two weeks before the survey, two Republican lawmakers, Pennsylvania’s Sen. Rick Santorum and Michigan’s Rep. Peter Hoekstra, released an intelligence report in Washington saying 500 chemical munitions had been collected in Iraq since the 2003 invasion.<\/p>\n

“I think the Harris Poll was measuring people’s surprise at hearing this after being told for so long there were no WMD in the country,” said Hoekstra spokesman Jamal Ware. […]<\/p>\n

Conservative commentator Deroy Murdock, who trumpeted Hoekstra’s announcement in his syndicated column, complained in an interview that the press “didn’t give the story the play it deserved.” But in some quarters it was headlined.<\/p>\n

“Our top story tonight, the nation abuzz today …” was how Fox News led its report on the old, stray shells. Talk-radio hosts and their callers seized on it. Feedback to blogs grew intense. “Americans are waking up from a distorted reality,” read one posting.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It’s the one thing about politics in the 21st century that I just can’t get over — the right has its own opinions and its own facts<\/i>. It doesn’t matter what David Kay, Charles Duelfer, Scott Ritter or any of the other credible inspectors, many of whom were hand-picked by the Bush White House, say about WMD. Reality interferes with politics, so the answer is to retreat further into fantasy.<\/p>\n

And when a poll shows that conservative confusion has spread among the electorate, this isn’t indicative of a problem; it’s proof that conservatives were right all along.<\/p>\n

It’s as if we’re stuck in a Twilight Zone episode.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

About two weeks ago, Harris released a poll that still has the political world confused. The pollster found that half the country believes that Saddam Hussein’s government had weapons of mass destruction when the U.S. invaded in 2003 — a marked increase over the last year. I still have to believe that the results are […]<\/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-8139","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8139","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=8139"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8139\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8139"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8139"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8139"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}