Ray Robison has a new article up at the American Thinker in which he takes the LA Times and Bloomberg to task for their recent poll suggesting military personnel and their families are turning against Bush:
The LA Times writes,
“Families
with ties to the military, long a reliable source of support for
wartime presidents, disapprove of President Bush and his handling of
the war in Iraq, with a majority concluding the invasion was not worth
it”.
Bloomberg claims,
“skepticism
about the war reflects a growing disenchantment within the broader
military community, long a bastion of support for the Bush
administration and Republicans. Among active-duty military, veterans
and their families, only 36 percent say it was worth going to war in
Iraq.”
But Ray notices a similiar poll at Military.com has the completely opposite result plus he notes the percentage of those polled by the LAT’s and Bloomberg appear to be quite lacking:
This poll which is being billed as a rebuke to the president by military families includes only 10% of respondents who actually claim to have a family member who is serving or has served in Iraq or Afghanistan. Therefore, the number of respondents who had family involved in Iraq specifically is even less than 10%. So the people who are supporting family members in Iraq actually had very little to do with these conclusions as a whole.
But look again at the claims from Bloomberg and the LA Times. They claim the respondents were critical over Iraq, not Afghanistan. Let’s be generous and guess that two-thirds or 100 of these respondents claimed to have a family member who served in Iraq. According to a recent USA Today article, over 1.5 million troops have served in Iraq. To try to take a poll with 100 or so respondents out of a pool of over 1.5 million is absurd.
There is no statistical validity and no way to assign any confidence to the conclusion that military family members of those who have fought in Iraq are turning against the President because of Iraq. The methodology statement notes that the margin of error for this subgroup is 8%. I would suggest it is quite a bit larger when you consider other factors.
How did they confirm that these respondents are actually military family members? What was the verification process, if any?
Additionally the poll was weighted by census portions for “national region”. Which makes no sense if your polling a specific segment of the population such as families of the military. It should be weighted to the regions by the rate of service in the military.
Weighing by overall census population means that military relatives in highly populated areas like New York City and LA, places where President Bush and the Iraq war are especially unpopular, are overrepresented compared to military families from the rural South. If this is going to be touted as a military poll it should have been conducted weighting for military families’ distribution regionally.
Finally he notes that a few of those polled who they decided to quote have some questionable backgrounds:
The LA Times quotes Mary Meneely of Arco, Minnesota who said
“The man went into Iraq without justification, without a plan; he just decided to go in there and win, and he had no idea what was going to happen,”
and then compared Iraq to Vietnam. Her son, who was an Air Force reservist wasn’t even in Iraq, but Afghanistan.
Her husband, Tom Meneely is a liberal activist who writes anti-Bush tirades to the media. He wrote to TIME magazine:
“Bush’s litany of mistakes can be defined in common terms by every kindergartner in America.”
And:
The LA Times also cites
“poll respondent Sue Datta, 61, whose youngest son, an Army staff sergeant, was seriously wounded in Iraq last year and is scheduled to redeploy in 2009.”
As an army sergeant, he would be required to have an army email account through the Army Knowledge Online portal. I have searched for “Datta” in the email address database. I found four people with the last name Datta and none matched the rank of SSG or held a rank even close to that. The most plausible match is an army Specialist which is several ranks and years junior to a staff sergeant.
It is odd that an extensive search failed to turn up any information on either Datta’s son — not even a news article about his “serious wounding” — or the Meneely’s son on the Internet. But the article doesn’t actually name either son which makes it difficult to verify their stories. I have requested confirmation from the LA Times of the identity of these military members.
All in all another shoddy job done at these two liberal rags in their continuing quest to tear down this President, at whatever cost is necessary.
But we’re not done yet. Take a look at the New York Times newest embarrassment: (via Patterico’s Pontifications)
This
should be a major embarrassment for Linda Greenhouse and the New York
Times. Her husband submits an amicus brief on behalf of GTMO detainees, and
when they win, she gushes
that the opinion “shredded each of the administration’s arguments” and was a
“sweeping and categorical defeat for the administration” thatleft human rights lawyers who have pressed this and other cases on behalf of
Guantánamo detainees almost speechless with surprise and delight, using words
like “fantastic,” “amazing” and “remarkable.”Why, my husband used all those words to me just last night . . . in
bed!
Ed Whelan, who first caught the significance of the story:
I don’t know what standards of journalistic ethics the New York Times
and Greenhouse purport to adhere to. The Code of Ethics of
the Society of Professional Journalists (which describes itself as the “nation’s
most broad-based journalism organization” and has some 9,000 members) sets forth
the proposition that journalists should “[a]void conflicts of interest, real or
perceived.” But that proposition would appear elementary for any
journalist with any claim to being objective.
Me thinks Linda has some esplaining to do.
Lastly, take a listen to David Shuster letting the facade of objectivity and unbiased reporting fall away.
So with all this criticism being leveled at Bush do you think he will run for another term?
Sigh….
See author page
Curt most Americans do not think that going to war in Iraq was worth it.http://www.gallup.com/poll/1633/Iraq.aspx
Gallup indicates a pretty constant high 50s low 40s over the last 6 months.
Now as to the Military.com poll Curt did you personally look at that poll ? I did
http://www.military.com/NewsContent/0,13319,142665,00.html
The poll report is titled ‘War Support Waning”
The Military.com poll shows that among the 5400+ respondents
WHEN SHOULD AMERICAN TROOPS WITHDRAW FROM IRAQ
they were given 3 choices for answers
#! The end of 2008. That’s plenty of time.
#2 Now. We’re wasting lives and resources
#3 Not until the insurgency is totally defeated.
17% The end of 2008
41% Now
41% When the insurgency is defeated.
These numbers are about identical to the 6 Gallup polls. The military.com poll was done in July ’07
Your gallop stuff has already been debunked in an earlier thread to which you never respond as usually is the case. That old poll was not the one cited:
http://www.military.com/pollresults?poll_id=3101&poll_frame_src=/votingpoll/results.do
One of these days you may get something right John but for now your batting a big fat zero.
Mr. Robison probably has some information that I’m not seeing, but searching for her son under her name in a database and not finding it doesn’t mean he doesn’t exist. My husband’s last name is not the same as his mother’s.
That’s right. Military families reject victory, they’ve now been convinced that honorable defeat is the only way to go. I can feel a new slogan coming for the Democratic Party: “Peace through Honorable Defeat!”. Victory leads to animosity from other cultures and loss of respect for them, and defeat only to contempt by other cultures, which is instructive. We must lose for the sake of the children so that they are not hated! The children demand defeat! The only war worth fighting with all our strength is the war on Global Warming because that’s a war against ourselves, and how can that be wrong???
To say I am disgusted but not surprised would be no surprise. The MSM has consistently lied, distorted, outright fabricated fabricated, and propagandized for the enemy and for leftist seditious, partisan reasons. More and more people are waking up and seeing that the Dems and MSM have been lying about the US losing/failing/whatever else negative on the war effort. It reeks of elitist arrogance when we witness the MSM create lie after dirty lie that is so easily refuted.
But then the left is behind us all the way…. with a sharp knife for our backs, a gag for our mouths, and an operations/intelligence ‘leak’ for our enemies…. A truism sadly repeated almost daily.
On a lighter note, Igor, you should write for The People’s Cube! “Peace through Honorable Defeat!” is dead on about the left, their idiotic doublespeak, and their insane, self-hating, ‘blame America first, last and always” mentality!
Okay, I am sorry if this puts a burden on anybody. However, I see polls all the time. None of them are cohesive, well not all the time. How can I tell if the poll that I am reading is accurate? Is there a way to determine if the data I am being given is solid? Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks.
Seal Patriot: There’s only one poll that matters and it’s held on election day.
Opinion polls may indicate trends or provide a snapshot of what a small slice of Americans are thinking.
But of course there is a lot of bias in how the poll questions are written, and how the results are weighted statistically in an attempt to make the result more reflective of the wider population.
Most opinion polls are crap, and they always under-represent the conservative viewpoint.
The best tool I’ve found to help understand polls in the election process is the Real Clear Politics polling averages which combine the results of a number of different polls. The charts especially are a good indicator of trends in a candidate’s strength or weakness:
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/charts/2008_election_primaries/republican_primaries_chart.html
Yawn…rhetoric compelling, suggesting, or supporting a withdrawal from Iraq at this point is sheer distraction from the reality that it’s begun, it was ordered/started in September, and as long as things don’t get worse the withdrawal will continue until the 2008 election. Yes, some troops are likely to remain in Iraq at the request of the Iraqi govt (and in support of UN resolutions like 1483 which compel the US to stay in Iraq by UN demand), to aid the Iraqi govt, to continue training Iraqi forces to do the job so that Americans don’t have to, and of course to FIGHT AL QUEDA. Even with all that, the fact is that unless some sort of dramatic counter-surge happens, the US IS withdrawing from Iraq.
Demand, suggest, compel, call-for, withdrawal while it’s happening is absolutely pure political propaganda. Even the Democratic Party base isn’t buying the DNC’s 2006 promise to force and end to the war anymore. They didn’t even really try (a non-binding resolution is an oxymoron, not an example of action), and American forces are coming home because they’ve done their job more effectively, brilliantly, and with greater professionalism than any other generation before them…all with support from the American people that waxed and waned due to the deliberate disinformation and political propaganda put forth by the Democratic Party’s leaders, owners, and controllers as demonstrated by today’s articles and rhetoric that suggests, compels, and/or demands unconditional withdrawal or premature evacuation even while a successful return home has already started.
The left’s rhetoric has been proven hollow even to their own base by their own inaction, incorrect action, and the success of American troops-a success that is unprecedented in American history and even world military history. Praise them? Nah, better to use them as political tools to rant against a lame duck President so as to prevent him from being re-elected and to distract from the party’s ineptitude and impotence with Congressional power.
Right?
You goons… That SSG son of Sue Datta is my brother. His right arm has a nasty fasciotomy scar from his palm through his elbow, and on his outer forearm winding up to his triceps.
His last name starts with K. I dare not offer him up to those who can’t get past their own “confirmation bias” – look that psychological term up.
LA Times didn’t do shoddy reporting. You make silly assumptions about what a mother would risk about her son being a target of acidic vitriol like you put out. He already got hit by an IED. And about whether an injury would be published in a newspaper… His right arm suffered a severed artery and a partially severed nerve, and his right arm often suffers from severe pain. Thank God he had body armor, because the piece of shrapnel that hit him square in the chest merely put a hole in his shirt and scared him. He looked down, saw he wasn’t dead, took a deep happy breath, and then realized his right arm was all curled up and bleeding fast.
What else do you think LA Times made up?