Re: Poll: Americans oppose Senate criticism of war - is this nonsense?
Gar Lipow wrote:
http://tinyurl.com/7rde8
new poll conducted Nov. 17-20 indicates most Americans are sympathetic to Cheney’s point. Seventy percent of people said that criticism of the war by Democratic senators hurts troop morale - with 44 percent saying morale is hurt “a lot,” according to a poll taken by RT Strategies.
The Post claims this is a “non-partisan” poll because it is jointly conducted by a Democrat and Republican; but that would not prevent a pro-war bias - for that matter would not neccesarily prevent an anti-Democratic bias. The ovewhelming results smell wrong to me. 70% of USAians think that criticism of the war effort “hurts the troops”? Who is RT Strategies, and who is paying for the poll?
Hmm, googling turns up their collaboration with uber-pundit Charlie Cook. But this doesn’t seem to be one of those.
To ask the question is to bias the results (assuming “morale” and “troops” were in the question). If you’d asked if criticism of presidential decisions was patriotic, you’d probably get mostly yes’s. And the sequence of the questions would matter for the rest of the poll’s answers.
Doug