This is fucking mental stuff - Obviously it's long but have faith.
The World According to a Bush Voter
By Jim Lobe, AlterNet
Posted on October 21, 2004, Printed on October 22, 2004
http://www.alternet.org/story/20263/
Do the supporters of President Bush really know their man or the
policies of his administration?
Three out of 4 self-described supporters of President George W. Bush
still believe that pre-war Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction
(WMD) or active programs to produce them. According to a new survey
published Thursday, the same number also believes that Iraqi President
Saddam Hussein provided "substantial support" to al Qaeda.
But here is the truly astonishing part: as many or more Bush
supporters hold those beliefs today than they did several months ago.
In other words, more people believe the claims today -- after the
publication of a series of well-publicized official government reports
that debunked both notions.
These are among the most striking findings of a survey conducted in
mid-October by the University of Maryland's Program on International
Policy Attitudes (PIPA) and Knowledge Networks, a California-based
polling firm.
The survey polled the views of nearly 900 randomly chosen respondents
equally divided between Bush supporters and those intending to vote
for Democratic Sen. John Kerry. It found a yawning gap in the
perceptions of the facts between the two groups, particularly with
regards to President Bush's claims about pre-war Iraq.
According to the accompanying analysis offered by PIPA:
It is normal during elections for supporters of presidential
candidates to have fundamental disagreements about values or
strategies. The current election is unique in that Bush supporters and
Kerry supporters have profoundly different perceptions of reality. In
the face of a stream of high-level assessments about pre-war Iraq,
Bush supporters cling to the refuted beliefs that Iraq had WMD or
supported al Qaeda.
The survey probed each respondent's views at three separate levels:
One, their personal belief about the two issues; two, their perception
of what "most experts" had concluded about the same; and three, their
knowledge of the Bush administration's claims on either WMDs or al Qaeda.
The survey found that 72 percent of Bush supporters believe either
that Iraq had actual WMD (47 percent) or a major program for producing
them (25 percent). This despite the widespread media coverage in early
October of the CIA's "Duelfer Report" - the final word on the subject
by the one billion dollar, 15-month investigation by the Iraq Survey
Group - which concluded that Hussein had dismantled all of his WMD
programmes shortly after the 1991 Gulf War and never tried to
reconstitute them.
Nonetheless, 56 percent of Bush supporters are under the impression
that the expert consensus is exactly the opposite - that Iraq had
actual WMD. Another 57 percent think that the Duelfer Report itself
concluded that Iraq either had WMD (19 percent) or a major WMD program
(38 percent).
Only 26 percent of Kerry supporters, by contrast, believe that pre-war
Iraq had either actual WMD or a WMD program, and only 18 percent said
"most experts" agreed on the same.
Results on Hussein's alleged support for al Qaeda are similar. The
contention - which has been most persistently asserted by Vice
President Dick Cheney - was thoroughly debunked by the final report of
the bipartisan 9/11 Commission earlier this summer.
Seventy-five percent of Bush supporters said they believed that Iraq
was providing "substantial" support to al Qaeda, with 20 percent
asserting that Iraq was directly involved in the 9/11 attacks on New
York and the Pentagon. Sixty-three percent of Bush supporters even
believe that clear evidence of such support has actually been found,
and 60 percent believe that "most experts" have reached the same
conclusion.
By contrast, only 30 percent of Kerry supporters said they believe
that such a link existed or that most experts have concluded that it did.
Ironically, the only issue on which the survey found broad agreement
between the two sets of voters was the role of the Bush administration
in actively promoting the claims about Iraq's WMD and connections to
al Qaeda.
"One of the reasons that Bush supporters have these (erroneous)
beliefs is that they perceive the Bush administration confirming
them," notes Steven Kull, PIPA's director. "Interestingly, this is one
point on which Bush and Kerry supporters agree."
In regard to WMD, those majorities have actually grown since last
summer, according to PIPA.
On WMD, 82 percent of Bush supporters and 84 percent of Kerry
supporters believe that the administration claims that Iraq either had
WMD or major WMD programs. On ties with al Qaeda, 75 percent of Bush
supporters and 74 percent of Kerry supporters believe that the
administration claims that Iraq provided substantial support to the
terrorist group.
Remarkably, when asked whether the U.S. should have gone to war
without evidence of a WMD program or support to al Qaeda, 58 percent
of Bush supporters said no. Moreover, 61 percent said they assumed
that Bush would also not have gone to war under those circumstances.
"To support the president and to accept that he took the U.S. to war
based on mistaken assumptions likely creates substantial cognitive
dissonance and leads Bush supporters to suppress awareness of
unsettling information about pre-war Iraq," Kull says.
He added that this "cognitive dissonance" could also help explain
other remarkable findings in the survey. The poll also found a major
gap between Bush's stated positions on a number of international
issues and what his supporters believe Bush's position to be. A strong
majority of Bush supporters believe, for example that the president
supports a range of international treaties and institutions that the
White House has vocally and publicly opposed.
In particular, majorities of Bush supporters incorrectly assume that
he supports multilateral approaches to various international issues,
including the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (69 percent), the
land mine treaty (72 percent), and the Kyoto Protocol to curb
greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to global warming (51 percent).
In August, two-thirds of Bush supporters also believed that Bush
supported the International Criminal Court (ICC). Although that figure
dropped to a 53 percent majority in the PIPA poll, it's not much of a
drop considering that Bush explicitly denounced the ICC in the first,
most widely watched presidential debate in late September.
In all of these cases, majorities of Bush supporters said they favored
the positions that they imputed, incorrectly, to Bush. Large
majorities of Kerry supporters, on the other hand, showed they knew
both their candidate's and Bush's positions on the same issues.
Bush supporters also have deeply erroneous views regarding the extent
of international support for the president and his policies. Despite a
steady flow over the past year of official statements by foreign
governments and public-opinion polls showing strong opposition to the
Iraq war, less than one-third of Bush supporters believe that most
people in foreign countries oppose the U.S. decision to invade Iraq.
Two-thirds believe that foreign views are either evenly divided on the
war (42 percent) or that the majority of foreigners actually favors
the war (26 percent).
Three of every four Kerry supporters, on the other hand, said it was
their understanding that the most of the rest of the world oppose the war.
Similarly, polls conducted during the summer in 35 major countries
around the world found that majorities or pluralities in 30 of them
favored Kerry for president over Bush by an average of margin of
greater than two to one. Yet 57 percent of Bush supporters believe
that a majority of people outside the U.S. favor Bush's re-election,
while 33 percent think that foreign opinion is evenly divided.
On the other hand, two-thirds of Kerry supporters think that their
candidate is favored overseas; only one percent think that most people
abroad preferred Bush.
Kull, who has been analyzing U.S. public opinion on foreign-policy
issues for two decades, says that this reality gap reveals, if
anything, the hold that the president has over his loyalists:
The roots of the Bush supporters' resistance to information very
likely lie in the traumatic experience of 9/11 and equally in the near
pitch-perfect leadership that President Bush showed in its immediate
wake. This appears to have created a powerful bond between Bush and
his supporters - and an idealized image of the President that makes it
difficult for his supporters to imagine that he could have made
incorrect judgments before the war, that world public opinion would be
critical of his policies or that the president could hold foreign
policy positions that are at odds with his supporters.
In other words, Bush supporters choose to keep faith in their leader
than face the truth either about their president or the world as it is.
Ignorance is bliss...
The world according to a Bush voter
The world according to a Bush voter -
10-23-2004, 09:08 PM
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