In a breaking poll, it has been discovered that fully 50% of Americans
couldn't find their asses with both hands and a map.
...a Harris Poll released July 21 found that a full 50 percent of U.S. respondents -- up from 36 percent last year -- said they believe Iraq did have the forbidden arms when U.S. troops invaded in March 2003, an attack whose stated purpose was elimination of supposed WMD. Other polls also have found an enduring American faith in the WMD story.
Sweet merciful Jesus.
Timing may explain some of the poll result. Two weeks before the survey, two Republican lawmakers, Pennsylvania's Sen. Rick Santorum (news, bio, voting record) and Michigan's Rep. Peter Hoekstra (news, bio, voting record), released an intelligence report in Washington saying 500 chemical munitions had been collected in Iraq since the 2003 invasion.
I think we all remember that little incident.
Unfortunately, half of America has decided that instead dwell in alternate reality, where beer is plentiful, the maidens are voluptuous and very open-minded, and the facts about those shells found in iraq remain clouded in murk and ignorance:
But the
Pentagon and outside experts stressed that these abandoned shells, many found in ones and twos, were 15 years old or more, their chemical contents were degraded, and they were unusable as artillery ordnance. Since the 1990s, such "orphan" munitions, from among 160,000 made by Iraq and destroyed, have turned up on old battlefields and elsewhere in Iraq, ex-inspectors say. In other words, this was no surprise.
"These are not stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction," said Scott Ritter, the ex-Marine who was a U.N. inspector in the 1990s. "They weren't deliberately withheld from inspectors by the Iraqis."
Many speculate that Bushco's refusal to abandon the obvious fucking lie that was "Iraq presented a threat and had WMDs" as the reason for this continued American belief in bullshit.
Personally, I blame reality TV.
Despite the official findings, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has allowed only that "perhaps" WMD weren't in Iraq. And Bush himself, since 2003, has repeatedly insisted on one plainly false point: that Saddam rebuffed the U.N. inspectors in 2002, that "he wouldn't let them in," as he said in 2003, and "he chose to deny inspectors," as he said this March.
In the words of Jon Stewart: What's bullshit about this?
The facts are that Iraq -- after a four-year hiatus in cooperating with inspections -- acceded to the
U.N. Security Council's demand and allowed scores of experts to conduct more than 700 inspections of potential weapons sites from Nov. 27, 2002, to March 16, 2003. The inspectors said they could wrap up their work within months. Instead, the U.S. invasion aborted that work.
Fuck, three months ago Bush was telling West Point graduates that Saddam refused to disclose and disarm.
"Which isn't true," observed Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a scholar of presidential rhetoric at the University of Pennsylvania. But "it doesn't surprise me when presidents reconstruct reality to make their policies defensible." This president may even have convinced himself it's true, she said.
We all knew it was coming, but still, it needs to be repeated.
Presidential scholars are now theorizing that the President is DELUSIONAL.
Bat-shit insane, if you will.
And of course, the article continues to speculate that perhaps Americans are caught up in the delusion, desperate to have an excuse to continue to allow this terrible fucking war to continue. 50% of Americans might have accepted the Presidents magical fairy-tale world because Bush has fucked up the REAL world so badly we can't deal with it anymore.
Charles Duelfer, the lead U.S. inspector who announced the negative WMD findings two years ago, has watched uncertainly as TV sound bites, bloggers and politicians try to chip away at "the best factual account," his group's densely detailed, 1,000-page final report.
"It is easy to see what is accepted as truth rapidly morph from one representation to another," he said in an e-mail. "It would be a shame if one effect of the power of the Internet was to undermine any commonly agreed set of facts."
LGF? Redstate? Other wing-nut neo-con hallucinating jackasses? That was directed at you.
As always, the media is all about sensationalizing stories, lies, bullshit, and non-issues to make people excited and emotional, to get the blood pumping and to get more viewers.
Once again, Fox news gets the "Golden Turd" for their continued shitty reporting and misleading "reporters":
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.
For fuck's sake, people. Half of our country is insisting that lies are the truths.
We're obviously not reaching enough people. This is a fucking travesty, that after all the arguments from us, all the research and work, all the contributions from EVERYONE who dared call a lie a lie and dared the treasonous action that "telling the truth" has apparently become in this fucked-up country of ours, 50% of America is still fucking clueless.
I'm ashamed and dismayed. No, not dismayed.
What's the word?
Furious.
That sums it up better.