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Friday, October 22, 2004

Dumbest country in history

Outside of possibly Germany in the 1930's, the US currently has to be just about the stupidest country, on average, in world history. By stupid I mean a huge amount of ignorance coupled in many cases with an even larger ignorance about being ignorant, or in other cases with a huge pride in being ignorant. This article describes a recent poll that shows that 72% of Bush supporters believe that Iraq had WMD's in 2003, and that Saddam supported al Qaeda. 56% even believe that most "experts" believe that Iraq had WMD's, and 57% believe that the Duelfer report confirmed the existence of weapons and/or programs.
Remarkably, asked whether the U.S. should have gone to war with Iraq if U.S. intelligence had concluded that Baghdad did not have a WMD program and was not providing support to al Qaeda, 58 percent of Bush supporters said no, and 61 percent said they assumed that Bush would also not have gone to war under those circumstances.

“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.”

Kull added that this “cognitive dissonance” could also help explain other remarkable findings in the survey, particularly with respect to Bush supporters’ misperceptions about the president’s own positions.
This explains Bush's campaign stops. He and his supporters get together to delude each other. People expressing even the mildest of dissenting views threaten to blow the cover off the whole thing, so they are systematically excluded.