Over the past few weeks, we've had diaries, and flame wars, and comment hijacking, and personal attacks, and a whole bunch of heat and not too much light.
So -- I thought it might be good to just do a poll. Straight up, do the voting thing, and let's see where things fall out.
Because in the midst of the loud shouting, we probably have a couple hundred thousand lurkers, and when do THEY get a chance to speak?
More below the orange graph from Calc 301.
I'm sort of a data guy. I like data that tells me a story. Why not some data that shows the sense of the dKos community at a point in time?
One of the comparisons that gets thrown around a lot is Syria==Iraq. I won't commit on what I think of that comparison (don't want to skew the data), but I thought it would be interesting to see how people feel now about Syria with what they felt then about Iraq.
And to be fair, I worded the choices quite intentionally. We all know how Iraq turned out. The question is not how you feel about it now; the question is how you felt about it when it was presented. The same, I think, is fair about the current situation -- ask if you support it as the President has presented it.
Once again -- each of the Iraq choices includes "as it was presented then," and each Syria choice includes "as it has been presented to date."
Finally, there's the UNSURE option. I suspect there are a lot of those, but maybe not. Won't know till we do the poll, right? I thought it only fair to include it, though.
So, we wind up with three combinations on Iraq, and three combinations on Syria, for a poll with nine options.
Vote. Comment if you wish. I'm interested to see the results.
And BTW -- it occurs to me that this data might change with other options, like "support of Congress" or "report of UN inspectors" or "change to AUMF." If those things happen, I may do another poll later to reflect them. For now, this is the poll. Please vote your vote based on how things stand tonight, not on how they may stand in a few days or weeks.