US Public Skeptical of "Surge," 72% Disapprove of Bush's Handling of Iraq [A1] It isn't amazing that 61% of Americans think the US should never have invaded Iraq. [A2] What is amazing is that 35% still think it was a good idea. [B1] It isn't amazing that 76% (including 51% of Republicans) of Americans say that the increased US troop levels in Iraq have had no impact or are making things worse. [B2] What is amazing is that 20% think that things have gotten significantly better. [C1] It isn't amazing that 63% of Americans support a timetable for US withdrawal ending in 2008. [C2] What is amazing is that so many do not. [D1] It isn't amazing that 13% want to cut off money for the Iraq War immediately, or [D2] that 69% want further funding to be tied to the meeting of specific benchmarks. [D3] What is amazing is that 15% want the war funded with no conditions at all. [D1a] (By the way, that only 13% want to cut off all funding immediately goes a long way toward explaining the vote on the supplemental in Congress). [E1] It isn't amazing that 72 percent of Americans disapprove of Bush's handling of Iraq. [E2] What is amazing is that 23 percent approve. (Are these the horror movie fans in the Republican base?) [F1] It isn't amazing that 65 percent disapprove of Bush's management of foreign policy. [F2] What is amazing is that 25 percent approves. (They should be asked specifically of what they approve. The rest of us want to know.) I won't say anything mean about the fall to [G1] a 38% favorability rating for the Republican Party. If I were a Republican, I'd want to impeach Cheney before it goes on down to zero. Given that a third of evangelicals voted Democrat[ic] in the last election, it is not impossible that the GOP will end up a minority taste for years to come. posted by Juan @ 5/26/2007 06:23:00 AM |
The first point to bear in mind is that Don Juan specializes in Area L, not Area A. His commentary on things so near at hand as these is mere mortal commentary, it is not Credentialled Expertise™. Indeed, the things are so near at hand that not only MIGHT one ask that guy over there on the street corner opposite for his opinion ,as if it might be on a par with opinions inside the erudite fastnesses of the Ann Arbour Faculty Club or the strong-gated pleasure domes of the Kennebunkbort-Crawford Rodeo and Regatta Society, somebody in the applied Soc. Sci. line actually DID ask Joe Corner (or his scientistical equivalent). One does not get a break from Credentialled Expertise™ altogether on such an occasion, but at least the CE™ of a pollster's apprentice is quite different from that of a Levantine area studies guru.
When Prof. Cole errs about the Middle East, or even when he guesses right, he dispenses with sentimental flim-flam like being amazed, he says X unadornedly, then Y happens, and that's more or less that. I daresay the pollsters and their apprentices are equally unflappable and "professional" in the cheapjack sense: nothing any patient says, even nothing that she could possibly say, would ever amaze a wannabe Gallup or Zogby. This particular cheapjackery is so extremely cheap that I'll bet nine apprentices in ten have it down pat before the first coffee break on their very first day at the phone banks: "You think illegal immigration causes lung cancer, ma'am? That's interesting, but all we really need is 'approve' or 'disapprove.' I'll put you down as a 'disapprove,' ... if that's OK with you, ma'am? . . . Now ma'am, would you say that you STRONGLY disapprove of illegal immigration?"
Of course some Soc. Sci. grouch filters out fun stuff like that before the bland corporate product gets anywhere near the columns of The New York Times. Thrill seekers and amazement junkies only get to see good gray actuarial averages the same as everybody else. They must find the picking pretty slim a lot of the time, although no doubt the more imagination they put in from their side, the more amazement they can extract from the pasteurized and homogenized corporate product. Prof. Cole to some extent approaches opinion polls in that collaborative spirit, as was specially in evidence this morning when he wrote "They should be asked specifically of what they approve. The rest of us want to know" (at F2). He might have been a bit more specific, though, because it is really only the two percent of patients that like the Boy-'n'-Party foreign policy in general but do not endorse the invasion and occupation policy for neo-Iraq (see E2) that seem properly amazing. What can they be thinking of? What else has Little Brother been up to overseas that counterbalances and outweighs the manifest quagmire? The twenty-three percent of quagmire fans, however, are about as amazing as the sun when it rises in the east. Probably they can no more think of any other specific mischievment of the Crawfordites than decent political grown-ups can, but there is no reason they can't approve of whatever else the stumblebums may be up to without knowing exactly what it is. They support what their infallible Church supports, and for that purpose knowing the details is supererogatory.
It does, however, seem pretty clear that few, if any, of the GOP base and vile spontaneously think of immigration as being an issue of foreign policy. If they did, the discrepancy between E2 and F2 would have run the other way, with more of them approving of Peaceful Freedumbia in particular than of Little Brother's overall performance vis-à-vis foreigners.
Social scientizing may have inadvertently placed its thumb on the scale here, however, with the pollsters and their apprentices having decided in advance that immigration does not belong in this questionnaire. Few lay sheep of any political persuasion are likely to question the questionmongers along "professional" and methodological lines, even though one need not be a Rio Limbaugh xenophobe to consider that foreigners do not automatically stop being foreign by virtue of being found here in the holy Heimatland. The particular instance may be innocent enough, in the sense of involving no deliberate bias or Murdochlike manipulation. If the learnèd clerks had made plain that immigration IS a foreign policy issue before asking about [E], perhaps the Boy-'n'-Party crew would have come off looking a bit worse still. Yet beyond a certain point, why pile on? Balátar az seyáh rangí níst, as the evil Qommies proverbially say, "There is no colour beyond black."
Nevertheless, it seems clear enough that "technicalities" of that general type could give rise to substantive political distortion. In fact there exists a specialized subclass of "conservative" "intellectuals" who work through MSM polls like this one with a red pencil in order to demonstrate that the poor sweet puppies of the Right have -- once again, now as ever! -- not been given a fair shake. Judging by previous performances, I'd guess that these señoritos will zero in on [E1], "72 percent of Americans disapprove of Bush's handling of Iraq," and solemnly advise everybody that many or most of these patients, who amount to nearly three quarters of the whole clinic, hold that Little Brother has been insufficiently unilateral and preëmptive and aggressive and invasive for their taste. If only Dubya would be Dubya once again, and unleash some of that really amazin' Shock-'n'-Awe stuff like he used to know how to do!
That seems to me sheer ideological self-delusion, and I observe that with no more than a single follow-up question the pollsters and their apprentices could have revealed it as such. Not being a rightist or neorightist to wallow in self-pity about such perceived affronts, however, or try to prove that everybody is always picking on liberals and donkeys with systematized unfairness and imbalance, I am content merely to observe the phenomenon. I have no desire to go on and whine a little bit about it too, or accuse the social scientizers of either "professional" or political misconduct for not asking my additional clarificatory question. There's more than enough of that sort of behaviour going the rounds already without any additional Americans joining in the Carnival of Self-Pity. Rather an indecorous show, that one.
It does not qualify as "amazing" that such a question was not asked, but then if it had been, that would not be particularly amazing either. It's no big deal either way. I should have enjoyed watching the señoritos of Wingnut City work their way around an obstacle like "4% of those who disapproved of Bush's handling of Iraq thought that the handling should have been more vigorous and proäctive, 83% disagreed, and 13% expressed no clear opinion or declined to answer." Naturally the señoritos would have had no significant difficulty in doing the trick required of them, because in the last ditch -- which is close to where they find themselves at the moment as regards their Peaceful Freedumbia -- they simply don't care whether Americans at large agree with Boy-'n'-Party invasion and occupation policies or not. They can always relapse into Profiles in Courage mode and start quotin' us "Who knows not that to save the people, one must often oppose them?" "President Sorensen" has done a good deal of mischief with that book that he really ought to be called to account for, as it seems to me, although in fairness one should allow that Grant's Old Party would have had strong ancestral tendencies to despise the witless and reckless mob even if that particular book had never been written at all.
Opinion polling, and social scientism more generally, cannot get all the way to the bottom of what is really going on here. It is a bit of a mystery why this should be the case. Soc. Sci. should have worked out better, as far as I can see, but it is plain as day that it has not. I presume the SS practitioners must have gone about their enterprise the wrong way, somehow, but as to exactly what went wrong with their chosen way, I am pretty well clueless. The fancy ab externo explanations of so little success ever securely attained in the course of so originally promising an Enlightenment project that I happen to know of -- say especially the explanations of Prof. Dr. G. Vico and of the late Prof. I. Berlin and of "postmodernism" generically -- fail to elucidate the failure secondarily almost as badly as the primary failure failed itself. Mere commonsensical stuff along the lines of "People are not planets, people have Free Will, in case nobody ever taught you right, Mister, and that is why you'll never get a Science of People comparable to your brain surgery and your rocket science" is no better than the higher-falutin' stuff. Unfortunately it is also not discernibly any worse either.
These things being so, one could do worse than take Prof. Whitehead's advice and have recourse to Plato, whose Gorgias can scarcely be said to explain the failure of Soc. Sci. by calling it a mere "knack" comparable to what the executive chefs and executive perfumists of old Athens used to do, but does at least manage to describe vividly and memorably. This author took to social-scientizing himself later on in his very distinguished career, of course, but that development, though regrettable, yet remains instructive as well. So too is the forgery of whoever forged Epistle VII for Citizen Plato, wherein philosophy itself is effectively reduced to a knack, although the reverent and august verbal circumambience is such as to make it very difficult to perceive that this reduction is what is happening, and the knack in question ends up sounding rather suspiciously like some mediaeval Beatific Vision. Epistle VII was very carefully crafted for marketing to amazement junkies, and there is much to be learned from it, even though what Citizen Plato really thought happens not to be.
Closer to home, it looks as if George XLIII Bush has about come to the end of his knack. Hardly anybody wants more Lone Rangerism from The Boy, and his Harvard Victory School MBA's, and his Big Management Party. A detectable majority of Uncle Sam's nieces and nephews, though perhaps not really a majority of seventy-two percent over twenty-eight percent, (2.57 to 1, that comes to -- golly!) now crave a sort of slow movement in the Political Sonata, some quieter interval in which maybe even Tonto might possibly get a note or two in edgewise on occasion. A true Master of Knackery would accommodate us, even if she privately thought our wishes foolish and maybe even risky, but George XLIII Bush is not quite exactly a Master of Knackery. The Boy still thinks Father Zeus and Mr. Micawber will show up for himself, and his Party, and his Victory School, at the last moment and then it will be all drums and trumpets and Te Deums ever after, with no need whatsoever for any borin' slow movement or any silly nonsense about Tonto. Televisionland and the electorate will snap out of their present MSM-induced funk and sing hearty hosannahs to Petrolaeus and Crocker, but above all to The Boss of all the Petrolaei and of all the Crockeres, down at Rancho Crawford, or up at Kennebukport as the case may be! Everything shall yet be made well again, all things shall soon be restored to "normal" most excellently well, the whole world not turned upside down after all . . . .
Oh, well, that's definitely one possible point of view, no doubt about it. ’Astaghfiru lláh! strikes me as the best and briefest criticism thereof.
(Kindly allow me to wish everybody happy days, even despite ....)
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