Phony poll, phony results, phony news story….and it get worse from there
We dissected a bogus story on MSNBC for you the other day, meant to create a negative view of the Bush administration and the Republican controlled Congress on the eve of the so-called nuclear option by portraying the public as Angry — Angry as in “throw the bums out” 1994 Angry. (You can see Matt Lauer question Tim Russert about the poll here by following the “poll analysis” link.) Democratic pollster Peter Hart, from our story:
“The public is exceptionally displeased with the Congress,” Hart said. “It is [its] lowest set of numbers since May of 1994,” the year when congressional Republicans defeated their Democratic counterparts in the midterm elections to take control of both the House and Senate. According to this poll, by 47 percent to 40 percent the public says it would prefer Democrats controlling Congress after the 2006 elections.
We were suspicious of the poll because (1) we see no evidence in the real world that the electorate is particularly angry; and (2) the poll did not detail its demographics, the reddest of all red flags. We said we would amplify our comments when the supplementary information became available. Here’s Larry Kudlow this morning via RCP:
The party-labeling sample includes 41 percent Democrats and only 36 percent Republicans.
The last election was 37/37 D and R, as we reported, so the bias of the poll towards Democrats is blatant (and yes we know the counter-arguments, thank you). So if we adjust the poll to conform with um, reality, the results become that the “public” wants a Democrat controlled Congress by 43/41 margin. Big deal, or rather, no big deal. This polling group is the same one that predicted — a couple of days before the 2004 election — that the public wanted a Democrat controlled Congress 44/43, and we know how that turned out.
It has become so tiresome to write about the unacknowledged partisanship, anti-Americanism, and mendacity of the Old Media. We leave you with a link to the Powerline piece on James Watt, and Hugh Hewitt’s commentary on the anti-military zealotry of the MSM, where this disgusting behavior on the Old Media’s part is not just tedious, but potentially lethal:
The combined volley of a fake story (Newsweek’s) and an old story (the New York Times’) underscore Terry Moran’s assertion that there exists deep hostility to the military in the MSM, and Linda Foley’s idiocy is proof positive of the existence of a lunatic fringe that will believe whatever they have to believe in order to justify to themselves their feverish hatred of George W. Bush. It is almost inevitable that more anti-military stories will surface, powered by more leaks, all designed to discredit a war effort that is all too obviously succeeding in Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon and hopefully elsewhere in the Middle East.