This man is named
Ben Smith.
Today he used his Conservative Message Delivery System known as "Politico" to lie to his readers.
This is what apologists for the Empire do to protect the interests of that Empire.
I know it won't come as a huge shock to anyone who has ever read the kind of wildly profitable Conservative-masquerading-as-Centrist bilge that Politico extrudes every day to discover that when Ben Smith desperately went digging deeeep into the internet midden pile to find something -- anything -- he could use to refocus the outright, asylum-escapee zombie madness of the Birthers Who Wouldn't Die through the obligatory Beltway "Both-Sides-Do-It" lens:
I've been looking for a good analogue to the willingness of Republicans to believe, or say they believe, that Obama was born abroad, and one relevant number is the share of Democrats willing to believe, as they say, that "Bush knew."
The very best he could come up with was this, from a single Ohio University poll in 2006, the results of which you find from clicking on the link --
Question:
There are also accusations being made following the 9/11 terrorist attack. One of these is: People in the federal government either assisted in the 9/11 attacks or took no action to stop the attacks because they wanted to United States to go to war in the Middle East.
Answers: ( respondents)
Very likely 16%
Somewhat likely 20%
Not likely 59%
Don't know 5%
don't exactly match this screaming headline under which Mr. Smith so promiscuously misrepresented them:
"More than half of Democrats, according to a neutral survey, said they believed Bush was complicit in the 9/11 terror attacks."
Not that it matters in the slightest.
Virtually every wingnut colleague or friend I have ever tried to patiently drag out of their ideological spider-hole by debunking one more...and then one more...and yet again one more crackpot email a raving about the latest imaginary Obama outrage (Jesus Fucking Christ don't you people ever just get plain fucking tired of letting the same fucking lying bastards use your skulls as their outhouse over and over and over again?) has been responded to in the same way:
"Well, ya know the Lefties, they're are just as bad! Worse even!"
It's too late.
The Centrist poison is in the groundwater now: Because the money to be made by relentlessly pounding home the Both-Sides-Do-It-Ism is simply too great; because the bulldozing disinterest of the Beltway press in anyone who corrects or contradicts the Imperial dicta is too relentless; because the success rate of trying to debunk this shit retail reached a diminishing return flatline long, long ago...
...and, finally, because it balms the conscience and hides the guilt of the Servants of Empire who got so much so fatally wrong for so many years (my goodness, even the Worlds Greatest Blogger cannot be bothered to dig one inch below the Beltway Pablum to look at what the actual data actually said.)
The best one can do now is, as we say, document the atrocities and hope that some future historian can be found who will be more interested telling the story of how the Right gutted America than our present-day, billion-dollar media obviously is.
19 comments:
The whole poll, from July, 2006:
http://www.newspolls.org/surveys/SHOH33
1010 respondents. Based on responses to some of the questions, I would guess that about half were Democrats and half were Republicans. Nothing in that 9/11 question indicates that the people who thought "Bush knew" were Democrats.
Well, a lot of us went through a "9/11 Trooferism" stage. Most of us, however, grew up and realized that it's just plain arrogant to sit there and think you can say for sure what really happened on that terrible day. (And realizing that Michael Ruppert is a fucking toolbox also helped, at least in my particular case.)
Oh. My. God. This absolutely nails the prime source of my frustration for nearly ten years now.
Considering the Bush Admin. and Repug response to 9/11: the open joy, the almost instantaneous writing and passing of the civil-rights-revoking "Patriot Act", and instant (within minutes of the towers being struck) shrieking blame of Iraq/Hussein (who was completely uninvolved) in order to authorize an invasion, it is very easy for me to believe that there were quite a few very powerful people who knew what was going to happen, and were prepared to take advantage for their own politica-economic sakes, although not to help the victims in any way.
Its not crazy to think the Administration-Military Industry knew what was coming down, when there are several creditable Intelligence Agents who warned them, repeatedly. How could they NOT have known?
What part of "You've covered your ass" in response to the August 16th PDB is ambiguous?
I think it's time to do a control in this polling experiment. I want to know if it's possible for any question at all to get 90% of people answering the same way under the current methodology.
The "Bush knew" people are a tiny percentage of the crooks and liars audience, and people who think like the crooks and liars audience are a tiny percentage of democrats. There's no way those results are real.
I see the "both do it" theme as behind the recent attention the Palin birtherism story is getting, e.g. Salon's multiple posts on it. (I'm not saying it's a conspiracy!)
The argument that Truthers have anywhere near the same level of support within the Democratic party that Birthers have in the Republican party is just absurd. Birthers are, what, a good 20%, 30% hell maybe 40-50% of the Republican party.
Truthers? I was at Fighting Bob Fest last fall. Certainly a more liberal/progressive cross section of (primarily) Democrats. Yes, they had one booth (out of maybe sixty) in the exhibition hall. Not especially popular with the passersby, and I was one of the people that stopped by and tried to debunk some of the more egregious (in some cases, flat out wrong/impossible technically) claims they made. In their unwillingness to listen to opposing views, yes, they are similar to the Birthers and Tea Jihadists. Later that day several Truthers interrupted a speaker by marching with banners and shouting 9-11 slogans. They were not well received, even getting a smattering of boos in the grandstands where I was sitting. Compare that to the support Birthers get when pulling their crap (say, holding up a birth certificate in a baggie), the adulations and serious discussions and time they get on Fox and Hate Radio.
I'd be surprised if Truthers were more than a few, single-digit percent of Democrats (if that). Ben Smith's pretzel logic is pathetic.
Nice article, thanks for the information.
So I've asked Smith, with whom I occasionally correspond, to respond.
Okay, I've heard from Smith. His data come not from the general survey numbers you cite but from Democratic crosstabs Scripps sent him, as he says in his post. (Wonder what the Republican crosstabs reveal.)
So in 2006, 50.8 percent (more than half!) of Democrats surveyed found it very likely or somewhat likely that Bush, at the least, took no action to stop the 9/11 attacks because he wanted to go to war in the Middle East.
Technically, then, based on this survey, Smith is correct.
Whether or not the results of a single snapshot in time five years ago deserve bold print and an assertion that this is comparable to persistent birtherism is a matter of perspective. I'd call it a pretty dubious comparison.
The Constant Weader
Sorry to be such a comments hog. Here's what I just wrote to Smith:
... respondents may have seen this as a "trick question." The August 6, 2001 briefing memo titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike," which was revealed to the public & got a lot of press in 2004, might have factored into the thinking of some respondents. Also, I think that by 2006, different stories about Bush's early 2001 expressions of a desire to depose Saddam also had come out in the press. So if a respondent factored in the fact that (a) "people in the federal government," including Bush, knew an attack was likely, & (b) Bush wanted to take down Saddam before 9/11, he wouldn't be entirely loony to think it "somewhat likely" that "people in the federal government either assisted in the 9/11 attacks or took no action to stop the attacks because they wanted the United States to go to war in the Middle East?"
Besides, "people in the federal government" aren't Bush, and your assertion was that
"More than half of Democrats, according to a neutral survey, said they believed Bush was complicit in the 9/11 terror attacks."
"People in the federal government" could be, you know, generals or CIA operatives, whose raison d'etre is war.
I said you were technically right. Now I think your central assertion was technically wrong.
The Constant Weader
Not to go overboard with word parsing but, at least to me, there is quite a difference in the question's wording between our government "assisting in" versus "took no action" in the 9-11 attacks.
Could I believe that Bush and/or some of his staff gave anti-terrorism a low priority, maybe even some of them secretly hoping for an attack that could be used as a reason to gin up a war? Yes, I could.
Extrapolating that into a statement that more than half of Democrats believe Bush was COMPLICIT goes beyond exaggeration and becomes a firm lie. I get this all the time when I argue with Tea Baggers about a "fact." Like the rich paying 40% of all income taxes (true), getting morphed into 40% of all personal taxes, then into 40% of all government revenue. Similar on how you get from 40% of all families have received SOME governmental monies (Social Security, student loan, stimulus check, UE, etc) to the Tea Bagger belief that 40% off all families don't lift a God Damn finger, but just wait for government checks to come in the mail as their ONLY source of income. Checks that are really paid for by hardworking conservative white men, of course, and justifies the shredding of the New Deal & Great Society.
Smith's false (implied) equivalence falls in the same category, and I'm four-square with Drifty in bashing this kind of enabler.
Thank you, everyone.
Thanks for the follow-up, Marie Burns.
Mr. Smith's stated object was to drag a what would otherwise be a straightforward discussion of how fucking unhinged the Right has become back into the Imperially-acceptable message that "Both sides do it." It looks an awful lot like Mr. Smith started with his Establishment-approved headline and then went on an internet scavenger-hunt to find some scrap of anything from 2..3...5...years ago to prop up his precooked nonsense.
In a world where it is commonly accepted general knowledge that the Right is usually wrong and the Left is usually right, people like Mr. Smith (and 1000s of others) would be out of a job. Which means that people like Mr. Smith have a powerful incentive to make sure that fact gets smothered in its cradle every time it it pops its inconvenient head up.
I don't for an instant think the collapse of the WTC or the buildings near it was caused by the Government, or any group, using explosives or some such thing. I sometimes wonder if they knew the planned attack date; its a remarkable coincidence that so many "important" government officials stopped traveling by Public Airline in the week preceding the attacks. But mostly I think it was a combination of incompetence and indifference, with a little hoping for another Pearl Harbor on the part of some.
Lest we forget, Richard Clarke and others did warn about probable attacks ahead of time.
Let us also not forget that the reason those towers came down so easily (one of the reasons cited to support the idea that the towers were wired with explosives) is because they needed to cut some corners engineering-wise to build structures that massive with the technology available in the late 1960's.
Frankly, I just think Ben Smith was capitalizing on the popular vilification of "truthers." Once upon a time, the 9/11 truth movement was pretty popular and it still has a lot of support, driven out of the mainstream.
Regardless of what I consider compelling arguments, the concept of "Let It Happen on Purpose" (never mind the MIHOP sect) has become taboo.
After much research, I am sure "government employees" knew and let it happen, no doubt.
"hope that some future historian can be found who will be more interested telling the story of how the Right gutted America"
No need to wait. Perlstein is already doing it.
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