Moore on Michael the Liar?

[Voyager]

@Hail Ants

I’m tempted to acknowledge a touché here, but I can’t quite because there’s an important difference.

The Bush administration did not make a slick, 2-hour pro-war propaganda movie stating this and show it in theaters across the world.

The President and his administration made speeches, presented (often circumstantial) evidence, to the American people, the UN, and the world (though it was really only the American people that mattered). The nightly news may have compressed it and presented it into 5-second sound bites, but the Bush Administration did not. And if the nightly news was the only place you looked for information to form an opinion on it, that was your (bad) decision to make. And after it was presented to the American people for nearly a year, the general feeeling was, ‘Yes, this is what has to be done right now’. No, not a resounding endorsement, but an acknowledgment that sometimes hard decisions have to be made.

They didn’t need a movie, they had FauxNews, and most of the rest of the media too. BTW, the majority of the people supported a war only with UN support before it started - of course once it did, public support jumped. BTW. I get my news the old fashioned way, from newspapers. I came around to being against the war through logic - no WMDs found by the inspectors, despite them having intelligence data about where they were supposed to be, and opposition from a lot of the world, odd if the Administration had been able to show convincing, secret, evidence for their existence.

There was heated debate, there were protests, there were walkouts. But there was no armed insurrection, there was no (serious) talk of impeachment, and most importantly there was no mass mutiny of the armed forces. In fact their attitude seemed to be, Let us do our job.

What interesting criteria for opposition! If I’m not shooting at someone (who exactly?) I’m for the war? I guess you must be in favor of withdrawing from Iraq, though, since they are protesting in a way you understand.

Anyone who, on Sept 12, 2001, did not know that in the next 5 or 10 years a whole lot of civilians around the world are going to die, there is little point in trying explaining it to them now. Do we really need to go all the way down the, “Peace in our time” road…

I see the brainwashing took. Let’s get this straight: Iraq had NOTHING to do with September 11. An Iraqi civilian had less reason to expect being blown up as a result than someone from Peoria. We had the right to self defense, which attacking Afghanistan would fall under, but being attacked does not give us the right to bomb anyone anywhere in the world for any reason.

[jshore]

@Voyager

They didn’t need a movie, they had FauxNews, and most of the rest of the media too. BTW, the majority of the people supported a war only with UN support before it started - of course once it did, public support jumped.

It’s also worth noting that polling shortly after the war showed that the probability that a person was for the war correlated strongly with the probability that they believed one or more of several misperceptions about the war or about Iraq:

An in-depth analysis of a series of polls conducted June through September found 48% incorrectly believed that evidence of links between Iraq and al Qaeda have been found, 22% that weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq, and 25% that world public opinion favored the US going to war with Iraq. Overall 60% had at least one of these three misperceptions.

Such misperceptions are highly related to support for the war. Among those with none of the misperceptions listed above, only 23% support the war. Among those with one of these misperceptions, 53% support the war, rising to 78% for those who have two of the misperceptions, and to 86% for those with all 3 misperceptions. Steven Kull, director of PIPA, comments, “While we cannot assert that these misperceptions created the support for going to war with Iraq, it does appear likely that support for the war would be substantially lower if fewer members of the public had these misperceptions.”