Monday, July 23, 2007

Well, I seem to have been wrong in the last post -- I was citing results of a New York Times poll, and I said support for the Bush Iraq policy was probably inching up because right-wingers were no longer angry at Bush about immigration ... but the Times blog post where the results were first reported has been updated with a chart that breaks down results by party, and it appears that numbers are inching up among Democrats and independents as well.

But the Times screwed up as well. The original title of the Times post was "Poll: American Support for War Inches Up." The current title is "Poll: U.S. Support for Iraq Invasion Inches Up." That's because support for the war isn't up - it's just that more people (though still far from a majority, or even a plurality) think the invasion was justified.

Saying "Iraq al-Qaeda Iraq al-Qaeda Iraq al-Qaeda" all the time is apparently working, somewhat.

But the numbers are a bit of a muddle (see the PDF of the results): More people think the invasion was worthwhile, a few more people think the Iraq War is part of the war on terrorism, and fewer people think we're creating terrorists by fighting in Iraq -- but the number of people who think we should decrease our troop levels has gone up since the last poll, as has the number who think we should pull all the troops out. Support for a timetable is up, support for a blockage of all war funding is unchanged, and support for unrestricted war funding is down.

Message: The public still wants to get the hell out.

And the dumbass blogger who wrote "THIS JUST IN...Americans Support The War!!" really needs to work on that reading comprehension.

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