The Daily Sandwich

"We have to learn the lesson that intellectual honesty is fundamental for everything we cherish." -Sir Karl Popper

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Location: Boston, Massachusetts, United States

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Monday, June 27, 2005

Sales of 'Newspeak' declining-- White House covers ears, shouts "Lalalalala!""

Dickhead Cheney goes to an interview and claims that the Iraqi insurgency is "in its last throes."

A daring member of the White House press corps asks White House Asspony Scott McClellan if that's the official line. He performed his official duty as admirably as ever by failing to say anything that could be mistaken for an actual answer.

But a new WaPo poll shows that obfuscation and lies aren't even working their magic on the true believers, this time:

As with virtually every facet of the Iraq issue, deep partisan divisions were reflected in views of the current state of the insurgency. More than a third of all Republicans -- 35 percent -- said the insurgents were growing weaker in Iraq, compared to 13 percent of all Democrats and 19 percent of all political independents.

As Daily Kos points out, this doesn't reflect a partisan divide at all. In fact, it's a hell of a lot closer to a concensus than pretty much any aspect of this administration. If it were deeply partisan, you'd expect to see 20% of Dems saying yes, and 20% of Republicans saying no. Not both sides coming within fifteen percent of each other. The real piece of news here is that more than 50% of all Americans have stopped believing this administration's hype.

I swear, John Allen Paulos' book A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper should be required reading for any journalist who gets within five feet of a statistic....

The really sad part about this is that the White House's response to this will be the same as always-- keep lying, just increase the volume. Just goes to show you, you might just fool some of the people some of the time, but you can fool 35% of Republicans all of the time. Just keep a Bible and flag handy... (Go ahead, watch tomorrow's speech on Iraq-- precipitated by no particular event but plummeting aprroval ratings. Make up your own "canned talking point" drinking game.)