California Conservative

The Washington Post’s Dan Balz has written another ‘Bush in crisis’-type of article with Iraq as the focus of attention. It seems that he’s blaming this ‘crisis’ on Bush’s declining polls and bad news from Iraq.

It’s interesting to note, however, that Rasmussen has Bush’s JA rating at 46%, only 4 points below the percentage of votes he got a year ago. Of course, Balz is likely relying on the AP-Ipsos polling that vastly oversamples Democrats by 12 points or the Washington Post polls that ’show’ Republicans comprise 23.8% of the registered voters. (Nevermind the fact that party registration as of last November was 37% Democrat, 37% Republican.) It isn’t a great leap of faith to think that this President’s ratings won’t be as good if Democrats make up 40% of the sample and only 24% of the sampling group are Republicans.

Here’s the key to understanding Balz’ analysis:

Only clear evidence of success in Iraq is likely to alleviate widespread unease about the central project of this presidency, public opinion experts and political strategists say.
- - -

His most realistic goal may be to manage widespread frustration about the war from growing into a powerful antiwar movement. “I don’t think there’s any way he could turn this into a big success,” said Steven Kull, director of the Program on International Public Attitudes.

Balz doesn’t even bother to investigate whether there’s progress being made because the TV highlights the terrorists killing Iraqis. If he’d checked into Operation Steel Curtain’s success, he might’ve heard Maj. Gen. Lynch’s saying that “It’s been very successful” and that “The U.S. military’s recent offensive in western Iraq has had a devastating impact on the al-Qaida-backed insurgency, with coalition forces killing over 700 terrorists and capturing 1,500 in the last two months alone.”

Anyone want to bet that the American peoples’ opinion would’ve changed had they heard that? If it didn’t, would anyone bet that capturing Zarqawi would change public opinion in short order? Here’s what Gen. Lynch said on that “”We come close to Zarqawi continuously…At one point in time in the not too distant future, we will capture or kill him.”

Would public opinion change if they knew that Zarqawi’s relatives took out half page advertisements in the 3 biggest Jordanian newspapers saying that they wouldn’t protect him and that they might even kill him? I’m guessing that it would. That’s why this information isn’t getting reported.

It’s very easy to understand when you realize that the Agenda Media’s big guns won’t report anything that will help President Bush. Things that don’t fit into their template are consistently ignored. If I got paid a dollar for each post-reelection article that was negative, whether it’s on the war or that Bush is a lame duck (I remember a couple of them coming out in the Washington Post last March) or that the economy would sink him or whatever, I would’ve earned a year’s salary before summer.

As for Mr. Kull’s saying “His most realistic goal may be to manage widespread frustration about the war from growing into a powerful antiwar movement”, this guy should get in touch with reality. Cindy Sheehan parked out in Crawford for 26 days this past August and got her 15 years of fame in that month. Along came Katrina and it was Cindy Who? Now she’s back in Crawford and the wire services said that an entire dozen peace protesters got arrested on Tuesday and that an entire 100 peace protesters had Thanksgiving dinner together.

If, after all of her August coverage, coupled with the Agenda Media’s adoration for her, she’s only able to get 100 or so peace protesters together, then how on earth can Mr. Kull think that there’s any possibility of a “powerful antiwar movement”? This doesn’t belong in a newspaper. It belongs in the fiction or fantasy racks at the local book store.

When you note that the ‘experts’ quoted in this story are tall tale tellers, should it be any wonder why people are dropping the newspapers in droves?

Cross-posted at LetFreedomRing

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 26th, 2005 at 8:42 am and is filed under Author: Gary Gross, Foreign Policy, Liberals, Media, W. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.