This has to be
simple tribalism, right?
Going to war with Iraq was the wrong thing to do, American voters say 59 - 32 percent. Republicans support the 2003 decision 62 - 28 percent, while opposition is 78 - 16 percent among Democrats and 65 - 26 percent among independent voters.
That's from a Quinnipiac poll released just this week, and that's a gigantic gap. That the Iraq War still enjoys 60+ percent support among Republicans while Democrats and independent support is only 16 percent and 26 percent respectively only makes sense if (1) the two sides reside in different dimensions, each with a different set of facts or (2) since the Iraq War was a Republican "thing," the wide long swath of the Republican base will continue to think it was a good idea from now until hell freezes over out of simple spite. President Obama could never have gained Republican support for any similarly sized operation in Libya, unquestionably run by a dictator just as rotten and just as linked to terror; President Clinton was pilloried for a far smaller intervention in Eastern Europe meant to staunch what had moved from bloody war to genocide—he was only doing it to distract from his problems here at home, the critics wailed. A trillion dollars, uncountably many dead and a region writhing in the throes of war and terrorism, though, that continues to be a
damn fine choice.
There is no doubt some of the Fox effect going on here. In embarrassingly large numbers, Republicans continue to believe that Iraq was involved with 9/11 or that weapons of mass destruction were in fact found, though both were proven false a long time ago; this lack of basic structural knowledge about their own supposed beliefs is endemic among Fox News viewers, thanks to a bevy of self-interested network hosts and guests themselves continuing to prop up such claims regardless of the evidence.
Still, that divide between the Republican base and everyone else is ... pathological. Call it the effects of yellow journalism or call it a stubbornness so strong that the base expects reality to warp itself to conform to them, call it whatever you like. It's nuts.