Majority of Americans Anti-American
John Quiggins gets off a very funny line here:
In the leadup to the Iraq war, we were repeatedly told that anyone who disagreed with the rush to war, or criticised the Bush Administration, was “anti-Americanâ€. It now appears that the majority of Americans are anti-American. A string of polls has shown that most Americans now realise that Bush and his Administration lied to get them into the war and that it was a mistake to go to war. The latest, reported in the NYT is this one from the Pew Research Centre.
It’s true that a majority of those surveyed in some polls now thinks the Iraq War was a mistake. Oddly, though, not the poll cited here, which shows 56% of the general public thinking “Efforts to establish a stable democracy will succeed.”
More significantly though, who exactly was “told that anyone who disagreed with the rush to war, or criticised the Bush Administration, was ‘anti-American’?”
This was an interesting poll. I am not surprised to see the overwhelming consistency of the scientist/engineer cohort leaning liberal on all of the questions. I am a little surpised however at the religious leader cohort views on a number of issues, particularly their precipitious drop in approval of Bush.
There are no two groups of people with more divergent world views than religious leaders and practicing scientist/engineers so to see them agreeing on Bush is heartening.
Don’t get happy, ken. My suspicion is that the religious types were supporting Bush because of his openness to their hardest-of-hard right social conservatism. But as it becomes more apparent that the average American doesn’t want to see abortion flatly outlawed and homosexuals strung up from trees, Congress will no longer dance to that tune. And if Bush can’t deliver laws through Congress, he’s no longer of any value to the evangelicals… just MHO.
Under what rock have you been hiding for the past three or four years, James?
Just another one of those reactionary-left memes that gets asserted endlessly with nothing to back it up except, “Under what rock have you been hiding?” and the like. I’d tell the originator of this tactic to call his office, but using his name would be a Godwin violation.
Ann Coulter made this claim at length in Treason. Similarly, David Horowitz here. Media Matters gives more examples.
Instapundit preferred the term “objectively pro-Saddam”, which would have served equally well as an introductory line.