Iraq Statistics from Idaho Observer

[jimnyc]

Originally posted by spillmind
wow, mark twain, good to have another unbaised voice on the board.

jim may say the credibility needs challenging, but you brought up a good point that he didn't bite off.



it *is* a pretty common poll, and maybe jim has a hard time believing most of those that support his endorsed general agenda aren't fortunate enough to share his intelligence?

for the most part, i believe this post is true, and just yet another illustration of the american public en mass. sad.

Spilly, I see you haven't taken them reading comprehension courses yet! LOL

I doubted the credibility of the amount polled. I don't think the sample is large enough to turn around and make a generalized statement about the entire USA.

I also clearly accepted that the poll, while small, was probably valid.

 

[spillmind]

i hate to say this, as it may be embarassing after you tried to insult me (again doesn't that ever get old?) over reading comprehension-

I also clearly accepted that the poll, while small, was probably valid.

does not fall along the same lines as:

It's also a fact that 99.5% of the country isn't accounted for in that poll.

your support for that poll was as clear as intelligence on the WMDs!

glad to see you are admitedly aware the of the mass misperception that parallels with your view on the 'war' on iraq.
now if you could only see why this is!

 

[jimnyc]

What part of this don't you understand:

I believe the poll of a little over 1,000 people was valid.
I believe they did not poll 99% of the country.

These are statements, not support in either direction. It's quite possible that you'll get entirely different results in various states. If they had done this in evere state, that would have been 20 people from every state. Yeah, let's say 7 out of 10 New Yorkers believe something when only 20 of them were polled.

 

[SLClemens]

Originally posted by jimnyc
Spilly, I see you haven't taken them reading comprehension courses yet! LOL

I doubted the credibility of the amount polled. I don't think the sample is large enough to turn around and make a generalized statement about the entire USA.

I also clearly accepted that the poll, while small, was probably valid.

Polling companies try to sample as diverse a range of the population as possible. They're not always accurate. Sometimes the way the questions are asked, and the order in which they're asked, skews the results. But face it - 70% of 1,000 people in 50 states? Unless the poll was a complete forgery at least 10s of millions of folks believe there was a connection. Probably more. How incredibly pathetic.

 

[jimnyc]

Originally posted by SLClemens
Polling companies try to sample as diverse a range of the population as possible. They're not always accurate. Sometimes the way the questions are asked, and the order in which they're asked, skews the results. But face it - 70% of 1,000 people in 50 states? Unless the poll was a complete forgery at least 10s of millions of folks believe there was a connection. Probably more. How incredibly pathetic.

It was 1,000 total, not from each state.

 

[SLClemens]

Originally posted by jimnyc
It was 1,000 total, not from each state.

Well of course it was 1,003 in total from 50 different states, not 50,000 from all 50 states!

 

[jimnyc]

Originally posted by SLClemens
Well of course it was 1,003 in total from 50 different states, not 50,000 from all 50 states!

So if only 1,000 people were polled out of nearly 293 million, where do you figure "at least 10s of millions of folks believe there was a connection"?

And I stand corrected, this is how many people were actually polled:

0.0003412 %

 

[SLClemens]

Originally posted by jimnyc
So if only 1,000 people were polled out of nearly 293 million, where do you figure "at least 10s of millions of folks believe there was a connection"?

And I stand corrected, this is how many people were actually polled:

0.0003412 %

Oh Gosh, how difficult can this be. If a poll before an election that surveys 1,000 people reporst that 700 of them said they'd vote Republican likey the GOP gets in. Maybe, just maybe, their polling was so off-base that the GOP only gets 40-50% and doesn't make it. But no one would conclude from such a poll, "well, the GOP only has .0003412% of the popular vote."

If you want to conclude that the very idea of a poll is nonsense then fine, make that argument, but this was a pretty standard one by the looks of it. Armies of statiticians review the methods by which some polls are taken. They can still be a bit off. But only someone with an incredible denial complex would conclude that only .0003412% of Americans believe this myth. It's in the tens of millions, probably more.

 

[jimnyc]

I've seen some elections in my time where a candidate was up by 10-15% in the polls and yet still lose. The polls they take are usually nationwide as well.

But only someone with an incredible denial complex would conclude that only .0003412% of Americans believe this myth. It's in the tens of millions, probably more.

Did I say that was how many people believed that "myth"? No, I didn't, I was showing what percentage of people were actually polled.

I'm sure there are quite a few misinformed people out there that still want to believe or see this connection, but I doubt it's in the tens of millions when our own government has stood up and stated it didn't exist.

 

[spillmind]

jim will try to ride a horse backwards to prove his point

to his dismay, the only point being demonstrated is the trend of you dodging the meat of the topic and trying to debate a totally circumstantial tangent.

want to start a new thread debating the validity of polls and get back to the topic at hand?

 

[jimnyc]

Spillmind,

I believe the poll was being discussed in parallel with the discussion of what Americans actually believe. I'm sorry you can't handle 2 topics at once. I'll try to dumb things down for you in the future.

 

[SLClemens]

Originally posted by jimnyc
I've seen some elections in my time where a candidate was up by 10-15% in the polls and yet still lose. The polls they take are usually nationwide as well.



Did I say that was how many people believed that "myth"? No, I didn't, I was showing what percentage of people were actually polled.

I'm sure there are quite a few misinformed people out there that still want to believe or see this connection, but I doubt it's in the tens of millions when our own government has stood up and stated it didn't exist.

It would be interesting for sure to see an updated poll. I'm almost certain the numbers would still be close to if not above 50%. Now, Washington obviously knows about such polling, so why has it taken them so long to make a feeble effort to inform us properly? What if Bush had stated at a number of news conferences that there had been no connection? Probably a lot less support for the war. Instead he used 9/11 and Saddam Hussein together in hte same sentence or paragraph as often as he could.

 

[Bry]

The administration has responded to these polls, saying that they cannot explain why so many Americans apparently believe that there is a connection between 9/11 and Iraq, and they said quite plainly, again, that such a connection is not supported by the intelligence. We can talk about the nationalistic will to self deception, or we can talk about how the rhetoric of the administration has somehow led to misconceptions without the administration actually saying there is a connection between 9/11 and Iraq. However, the argument that Iraq had no vinculations with "terrorist" organizations, or that a connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda is not significantly supported by the intelligence (even in the absence of a direct connection between Iraq and the events of 9/11) is not supported by the information available.

As for this poll in particular, obviously one could always respond "well, it is just a poll", and that may or may not discredit the information provided by the poll. But there is plenty of other arguments to be made without limiting ourselves to a simple attack on or defense of the validity of polls in general, which at best give us an idea of how the population is thinking, but says nothing about the causes of that thinking.

 

[rtm]

I don't understand, if Bush didn't sell the idea to the American Public that Saddam had nuclear weapons (false) he was trying to sell to Al Qaeda, how did 70% of the public think there was a Iraq/Al Qaeda link?

"Prior to Sept. 11, we thought two oceans would protect us," President Bush said about Iraq in an Oct. 14 speech in Michigan. "After Sept. 11, we've entered into a new era in a new war.

"Saddam Hussein and his weapons are a direct threat to this country," Bush said March 6 in a White House news conference. "The attacks of Sept. 11 showed what the enemies of America did with four airplanes. We will not wait to see what terrorists or terrorist states could do with weapons of mass destruction."

"Used to be that we could think that you could contain a person like Saddam Hussein, that oceans would protect us from his type of terror," he said at the same press conference. "Sept. 11 should say to the American people that we're now a battlefield, that weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a terrorist organization could be deployed here at home."

"We will not wait for known enemies to strike us again," he said Aug. 26 in an American Legion speech, rationalizing his Iraq attack. "We will strike them before they hit more of our cities and kill more of our citizens."



(In that press conference, Bush mentioned the Sept. 11 attacks nine times, Saddam 40 times, and Osama zero)

 

[Bry]

from my post, RTM:

"or we can talk about how the rhetoric of the administration has somehow led to misconceptions without the administration actually saying there is a connection between 9/11 and Iraq."

I'm aware of the rhetoric, and what you show is a very clear example of it, but they have been careful not to state directly that there is a link between 9/11 and Iraq. We can talk about the meanings of the evidence regarding connections between Iraq and "terrorist" groups, but there was evidence, and my only point was we're not getting anywhere beating the significance of a poll into the ground.

 

[dijetlo]

The administration can't be held responible for ignorance in the american populations, that's the place the media holds in the larger scheme of things. Unfortunately, I think we agree that the media needs some kind of serious reforming, so we probably wont get much debate on the point.

 

[SLClemens]

Originally posted by dijetlo
The administration can't be held responible for ignorance in the american populations, that's the place the media holds in the larger scheme of things. Unfortunately, I think we agree that the media needs some kind of serious reforming, so we probably wont get much debate on the point.

And here you really get to the crux of the issue - the Washington press corps are usually little but stenographers. Whitehouse officials hold conferences, favored reporters get one or two banal, predictable questions each, and networks pick out the most commercially viable soundbites for newscasts. In Britain and Canada, parliaments have a daily question period for opposition members, directed at an executive that is drawn from the legislature, and the differences in topics that make the news are enormous. Here reporters aer such wimps because they know that asking challenging questions or bringing up the wrong topics will lead to exclusion.

This is one of the main reasons why in this country Bush and Whitehouse officials have so much more executive power and responsibility.