Remember the whole WMD thing, where President George W. Bush and Colin Powell and all those guys looked the American People straight in the face and said “we are absolutely certain that Saddam Hussein has Weapons of Mass Destruction”? Many doubted this claim. The war happened, and the claim was absolutely totally undeniably indubitably proven false. But Republicans kept saying it like it was true over and over again.
Well, a current poll shows that a majority of Republicans believe that Saddam had WMDs.
The poll is here (PDF). It covers a lot more than just WMDs and is worth a look.
I find it interesting that the poll uses the term “Democrat” to refer to the “Democratic Party” but it does not use “Republic” to refer to the “Republican Party.” Anyway, the poll showed that “..63 percent of Republican respondents still believed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when the U.S. invaded in 2003. By contrast, 27 percent of independents and 15 percent of Democrats shared that view.” (see this summary)
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Just as a thought experiment, can you think of any question you could ask in a survey that would make a majority of Democrats look ignorant or in denial?
I mean, there’s the 9/11 Troofers, and the Trig Palin conspiracy theorists, but I can’t see them coming close to a majority. Any other ideas?
Uh… You do? Why in the world?
DaveL –
“A new poll shows deep support among liberals for the very Bush/Cheney policies they once pretended to despise”
http://goo.gl/H5u0b
@3,
Thanks, but that article is referring to flip-flopping on policy, whereas I was looking for something more directly analogous – persistent belief in discrete factual claims that have been conclusively falsified.
A number of comments:
1st, I don’t think the “Democrat” vs. “Republican” (vs. for that matter, “Independent”) is significant. I look at it as “Are you a Democrat, Republican, or Independent”, since “Independent” isn’t actually a party.
2nd, I’d LOVE to have seen this same poll when Bush was Prez. I bet that some questions such as, ‘Q14: How strongly do you agree or disagree with the following statement? “The U.S. President has too much independent power over American foreign policy decisions these days.”‘ would have radically different answers. (In this poll, over 60% of Reps strongly or somewhat agree vs. only 21% of Dems.)
3rd, more evidence of Republican moronicity (?) – over 50% of Reps “have always believed President Obama was born in another country.”
Some very interesting results in that poll… In particular, it’s striking that a majority of Republicans (53.3%) do not support any of the proposed means of cutting the deficit (tax increases, cuts in military spending, cuts to Social Security, cuts to Medicaid) whilst only 14.0% of Democrats do not support any option. Also, that 79.5% of Republicans think that it is “very important” that the US remain the world’s pre-eminent military power, but 52.4% of them would not support any tax increase to pay for this. (46.3% of Dems would not support tax increases for this purpose, but only 48.3% rate it as “very important” in the first place.)
Remind me, who’s the party of fiscal responsibility again?
It’s also interesting that, for every single question with a “Don’t know” option, Republicans are less likely to choose “Don’t know” than the general population – in many cases dramatically less so.