WTF: Half of U.S. still believes Iraq had WMD

[Godless Dave]

Half of U.S. still believes Iraq had WMD

Half? HALF?

Kill me now.

[scarey girl]

......words fail me. And yet, at the same time, I find myself barely surprised.


WMD haven't been mentioned in this country for, months, if not longer. Well, not unless someone is wanting to remind our government/labour party/tony Blair how they lied to us, oops, sorry, were misinformed and so released facts that weren't entirely right after all.

[verte]

That makes one hundred percent of my damned head ache.

[Quath]

From the article:

As Israeli troops and Hezbollah guerrillas battled in Lebanon on July 21, a Fox News segment suggested, with no evidence, yet another destination for the supposed doomsday arms.

"ARE SADDAM HUSSEIN'S WMDS NOW IN HEZBOLLAH'S HANDS?" asked the headline, lingering for long minutes on TV screens in a million American homes.

FOX news just makes me sick.

Quath

[verte]

Ugh, as much as I hate Faux News, it is useful to get a look at what the wingnuts are up to.

[dolemite]

The right wing spin machine (and its lackeys) continues to insist that there were wmd's. Or at the very least, they insist that an isolated piece of "evidence" adds up to wmd's. Jonah Goldberg/Cal Thomas/Insert asshole columnist's name here/add Christopher Hitchens as the token sort of liberal and the like always bring it up--whether subtly or blatantly.

The evidence is clear--but that never stopped these folks from spinnning a web of bullshit that is absolutely opposite of the evidence.

Remember, Bush said it best....you media types live in the reality based world, and that is your problem....or some such bullshit.

Damn.

[Mason]

We're a country that is not influenced to think for itself, we listen to what people tell us--and that's the only thing that's encouraged. It doesn't surprise me.

[Gurdur]

Mencken and Barnum were right.

[Seb]

Actually did send a shiver down my spine.

[Puck]

Godammit. I thought the percentage was at about 30. This is too discouraging. I mean, I know old rural Georgia women who know better than this. How can so many be so stupid? Not naive. Stupid. Anyone who, at this point, still believes that BS is stupid, plain and simple. Not mis-imformed. Stupid. Not blindly faithful to their party. Stupid. Stupid as fuck all.

Verte, do you still have that helmet abouts? I need it. Dammit.

[verte]

Originally Posted by Puck

Verte, do you still have that helmet abouts? I need it. Dammit.

I tell you, I am just going to order them in bulk.

[Benkyo]

I figure if I keep this up long enough without the helmet it'll cease to bother me so much.



If you can't beat 'em...

[Tharmas]

What’s hidden in the story and disguised in the headline is that it isn’t true. Half of the U.S. does not still believe that Iraq had WMDs. The percentage who believe is now greater than it ever was before.

IOW there is a propaganda machine at work that is rewriting history and getting people to believe it.

For example some moron wrote a letter to my local newspaper a couple of weeks ago and claimed that the “proof” of the WMDs was that Bush was too modest to claim the credit for it when they were discovered. You can bet if Clinton had found any he would have been all over the media bragging about it for months, the idiot concluded.

I’m not making that up. You can't defeat logic like that. The proof is that there is no proof.

[verte]

Originally Posted by Tharmas

What’s hidden in the story and disguised in the headline is that it isn’t true. Half of the U.S. does not still believe that Iraq had WMDs. The percentage who believe is now greater than it ever was before.

IOW there is a propaganda machine at work that is rewriting history and getting people to believe it.

For example some moron wrote a letter to my local newspaper a couple of weeks ago and claimed that the “proof” of the WMDs was that Bush was too modest to claim the credit for it when they were discovered. You can bet if Clinton had found any he would have been all over the media bragging about it for months, the idiot concluded.

I’m not making that up. You can't defeat logic like that. The proof is that there is no proof.

I really want to believe that no one could possibly be that stupid and be able to write. That they must be part of some clumsy propaganda scheme, like the episode with the fake turkey thing when they filmed "Waltons Mountain at Iraq" that Thanksgiving and the photoshopped cheering crowds of soldiers in front of our Feerless Leeder and all the rest of that wag-the-dog crap that they do so badly.

But then I see you are from Texas, and I know that Texas, like my own home state (Virginia) is just fucking weird.

So I will just put my helmet back on and pray for Canadia to invade us, eh?

[Shake]

Originally Posted by Godless Dave

Half of U.S. still believes Iraq had WMD

Half? HALF?

Kill me now.

Well, half the people thought it'd be a good idea to re-elect Dubya too. So what d'you expect?

[verte]

Originally Posted by Shake

Well, half the people thought it'd be a good idea to re-elect Dubya too. So what d'you expect?

Diebold's voting machines being the cutting edge in systems security, of course.

[Quath]

Originally Posted by Tharmas

For example some moron wrote a letter to my local newspaper a couple of weeks ago and claimed that the “proof” of the WMDs was that Bush was too modest to claim the credit for it when they were discovered. You can bet if Clinton had found any he would have been all over the media bragging about it for months, the idiot concluded.

I’m not making that up. You can't defeat logic like that. The proof is that there is no proof.

I use to debate on 123 ChristianForums the politics of WMD. There were a lot of players and a lot of strange bedfellows. I noticed that a lot of the time I was on the same side as a liberal Christian against a reasonable intelligent but very conservative Christian and a very dumbass Christian.

The sad thing is that the more reasonable Christian used logic like you just described. He was commenting on all the massive evidence of WMDs. When they found something that looked like it could have been associated with WMD, he claimed it was WMD (after all FOX news pretty much said it was). So I asked him why Bush had not claimed it as proof of WMD. He said that Bush didn't need to. It was just too obvious and he is not one to crow over his acomplishments. And this was from the more reasonable one.

After months and months of constantly showing that his sources and FOX news stories wee wrong, he still posted them and believed him. I stopped debating him because it just made me sad that someone could never learn from their mistakes and keep repeating them.

Quath

[Godless Dave]

The thing is the very team that Bush sent to find the WMDs released a report saying there weren't any and it looked like they had been destroyed in the early 90s. But that report is given the same credence in fundy circles as Terri Schiavo's autopsy.

[Storm_Raven]

Being ever so slightly cynical here, but I would be wondering what they are trying to slip past us, propoganda like that is very good at getting our attention, so that they are able to slip something past that if the public see it will cause uproar.

The American media is very much more under the thumb of your goverment than the British media is here. I was told by a reliable source that the American media would be denied access to the White house briefings if they came out against they Iraq War at the beginning. If Tony Blair had tried that in this country, the press in would have immediately published and broadcast the attempt at coercion.

It would not surprise me that a proportion of the American population do still believe that Iraq has WMDs, your education system from what I have seen and heard of it does not encourage you to question what you are told, especially by the authorities.

Storm Raven

[verte]

These are all excellent points, Storm Raven. Of course, I sometimes think that anyone who has internet access to post on some wingnut site like "mightyrighty dot com" has internet access to find other sources of information. If they want to, that is. At some level, I think they have to feel comfortable with the lies they are being fed and simply not want to look any further.

[Godless Dave]

Originally Posted by Storm_Raven

The American media is very much more under the thumb of your goverment than the British media is here. I was told by a reliable source that the American media would be denied access to the White house briefings if they came out against they Iraq War at the beginning. If Tony Blair had tried that in this country, the press in would have immediately published and broadcast the attempt at coercion.

The real scandal isn't that the White House threatened to remove access, it's that the press went along with it. They could have just said "OK, take away our access, we'll still report what we want". They could have made the denial of access a story. Instead, they said "Yes, Massa, we's be happy to pick Massa's cotton!"

Don't get too smug about the British media though. Remember, the BBC fired Andrew Gilligan for reporting a true story because it made Blair mad.

[Storm_Raven]

I'm not smug about the British media it's just that they do have more intergrity and independence than the American media has. The British media is far from perfect, they hyped up the WMD claims until they realised that they might be wrong.

I personally don't trust the media, I take information from various sources and know that none of it is the whole truth, to quote Ambassador Kosh (Babylon 5) "The truth is a three edged sword, your truth, my truth and their truth."

The reason I don't trust the media is because they are out to entertain as well as inform, they are in the main privately owned in this country and so reflect their owners views to some degree. Everybody has an agenda and an opinion.

Storm Raven

[Godless Dave]

Originally Posted by Storm_Raven

I'm not smug about the British media it's just that they do have more intergrity and independence than the American media has.

That's like being taller than Mini-Me.

[Storm_Raven]

The British press have the guts to stand up to our goverment a lot more than the goverment would like or the US goverment would tolerate from the American press.

The British government has been trying to erode our civil liberties and would have done so far more than they have done if it hadn't been for the press bringing it to the publics attention, causing there to be public debate and pressure to be put on the goverment.

The British goverment originally tried to railroad the Anti-Terror legislation through without a proper Parlimentary debate or any public debate, if it hadn't been for the British press raising public awareness of this fact George Orwell's 1984 would only have been twenty odd years late.

We have probably had far more vigorous public debate and scrutiny in this country over the anti-terror legislation than there has been over the Patriot Act and Homeland Security legislation in the United States.

Storm Raven

[Godless Dave]

Debate? Our Congresspeople don't even read the damn bills.

Yeah I followed the whole 28-day detention story. Blair is just shameless.