Post-Schna-ulations

The ignorant masses

I have moved beyond the initial despair of wednesday, and now the violent anger of thursday is cooling down into a simmer of disbelief and disgust. The article that I've posted pretty much sums up (to me) how The JaggerBush was re-elected: ignorance. Actually, I think it goes BEYOND ignorance, as it wasn't just being UNinformed, but being totally MISinformed (or just plain WRONG). And the correct info was out there, and the people were exposed to it, and they CHOSE TO IGNORE IT AND CONTINUE BELIEVING TOTALLY MISGUIDED AND FALSE INFORMATION. As despressing as it may be, and as angry as it may make you, anyone who has been left this week feeling totally overwhelmed by the ignorance of the voters of this country should read this article.

What Bush Supporters Really Think
(the following are select excerpts from the article, but I encourage you all to read the whole thing)

"It is normal during elections for supporters of presidential candidates to have fundamental disagreements about values or strategies," said an analysis produced by PIPA.

But "the current election is unique in that Bush supporters and Kerry supporters have profoundly different perceptions of reality. In the face of a stream of high-level assessments about pre-war Iraq, Bush supporters cling to the refuted beliefs that Iraq had WMD or supported al-Qaeda."

...

Seventy-five percent of Bush supporters said they believed Iraq was providing "substantial" support to al-Qaeda, with 20 percent asserting Baghdad was directly involved in the 9/11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon.

...

"To support the president and to accept that he took the U.S. to war based on mistaken assumptions," said Kull, "likely creates substantial cognitive dissonance and leads Bush supporters to suppress awareness of unsettling information about pre-war Iraq."

...

In particular, majorities of Bush supporters incorrectly assumed he supports multilateral approaches to various international issues, including the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) (69 percent), the land mine treaty (72 percent), and the Kyoto Protocol to curb greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to global warming (51 percent).

In all of these cases, majorities of Bush supporters said they favoured the positions that they imputed, incorrectly, to the president.

Large majorities of Kerry supporters, on the other hand, showed they knew both their candidate's and Bush's positions on the same issues.

Bush supporters were also found to hold misperceptions regarding international support for the president and his policies.

Despite a steady flow over the past year of official statements by foreign governments and public-opinion polls showing strong opposition to the Iraq war, less than one-third of Bush supporters believed that most people in foreign countries opposed Washington having gone to war.

...

"This appears to have created a powerful bond between Bush and his supporters -- and an idealised image of the president that makes it difficult for his supporters to imagine that he could have made incorrect judgements before the war, that world public opinion would be critical of his policies or that the president could hold foreign-policy positions that are at odds with his supporters."

posted by Schna @ 8:36 AM