NOT IF I CAN HELP IT! DEATH TO ALL COMPETITORS!!

Dafydd

I understand what you’re saying, but it’s cool. If people don’t want to read his stuff, they won’t. And if they do, they will.

And then The Times can ignore it, like it ignored the most recent WaPo poll with numbers favorable to Bush.

Since they only polled those who had watched the speech — and since liberals, like the Sunnis in the Iraq election, largely boycotted — the respondent pool for the Gallup poll was something like 25% Independents, 25% Democrats, and 50% Republicans.

You simply cannot use this for anything at all, except if you segregate the responses by party affiliation, at the very least (which Gallup did not do). Just as even the Washington Post poll should have corrected for the fact that they overpolled Democrats (yet again)… which means the pro-Bush results would be even more significant if they properly weighted the sample to correct for respondent-selection error.

To determine the effect of the speech and the subsequent weekend talk-show appearances by Bush people, it’s best to wait until the next regularly scheduled polling on the war. The next time WaPo does a poll, for example, it can be compared to the recent one (which showed positive movement towards Bush on the great majority of questions, negative movement on a few, and stagnation on a few).

Dafydd

They support war, especially when a Democrat is the White House (though it’s harder for liberals to adhere to their values when it’s a Republican administration in office).

But reliable reports of serious problems in Iraq - coming from non-liberal sources, and even from many strong supporters of the war - present a challenge to many of us, when we are presented with so many conflicting viewpoints and perspectives. All sides of the debate try to push their version of what the truth is… Oftentimes, the actual truth lies somewhere in between.

As for issue of poll figures and Iraq, Justin Logan, definitely not a liberal, wrote this excellent blog entry, less than one week ago… in which he cites poll figures provided by the Wall Street Journal, a pro-war newspaper. That was two days prior to President Bush’s speech, so if the numbers have shifted since then, that is not that surprising. But as more time passes, after this speech, expect them to shift again. That’s how it works in contemporary politics and public policy.