Yes, Iraq Definitely Had WMD, Vast Majority Of Polled Republicans Insist

From muckraker Dan Froomkin:

The poll, constructed by Dartmouth government professor Benjamin Valentino and conducted by YouGov from April 26 to May 2, found that fully 63 percent of Republican respondents still believed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when the U.S. invaded in 2003. By contrast, 27 percent of independents and 15 percent of Democrats shared that view.

Jim Lobe, chief of the Inter Press Service's Washington bureau, reported the finding in his blog on Wednesday.

The Bush administration's insistence that the Iraqi government had weapons of mass destruction and might give them to terrorists was a key selling point in its campaign to take the country to war. It turned out to be untrue.

And

Bush, Cheney and others consistently linked al Qaeda to Hussein in speeches they gave in the run-up to war, and the media rarely pushed back. But neither Bush nor Cheney continued to claim that there were actual WMDs in Iraq once the searches came up empty -- although they both continued to insist that Saddam had the "capability" to produce them.

Rather than a failure of the media, therefore, this latest poll result seems to indicate a refusal -- unique to the modern Republican Party -- to acknowledge facts.

More here.

Yeah, I've resorted to just copying and pasting my own facebook statements:

Okay, so mainstream conservative opinion rejects evolution, which is a fact. It rejects global warming, also a fact. It embraces the notion that President Obama was not born in the US, which is not a fact. And it doggedly holds onto those non-existent WMD as though the Bible proved it or something. Also, tax cuts create more revenue than no tax cuts. Never in this nation's history have so many seriously deluded people wielded so much power and influence. We really are in deep deep doo doo.

And my buddy Chris commented:

It isn't so much that those in power are deluded as it is that those in power are selling their agenda. It rejects global warming to protect big business. It rejects evolution because it flies in the face of the Bible. And it keeps trying to sell us on WMDs to justify that ridiculous war.

It's just too bad that so many just can't think for themselves.

To which I responded:

I think we'd be better off if it was that simple, just a sort of cynical web of lies to support a political agenda. What frightens me is that I think these people actually believe this stuff, for real, and once enough people have effectively divorced themselves from reality, then anything goes. Literally. I mean, there are conservatives out there, namely Charles Murray, who assert that blacks are inferior to whites because of IQ test results, which are seriously skewed for cultural and economic reasons, but are taken seriously by the mainstream media and Washington elites. Playing so fast and loose with facts, indeed, outright rejecting reality, is downright dangerous.

Well, there's no need to reinvent the wheel, is there?

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