Not quite two weeks ago, I discussed what public opinion polls had to say about how Americans reacted to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In a widely reported speech, Bush advisor Karl Rove had said:
Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war. Liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers.
My original post looked at polls done at the time that tabulated their results by party identification. I asked several public pollsters if they might provide cross-tabulations by self-reported ideology, and the pollsters at CBS News quickly obliged. Gallup released similar results a few days later.
A sad irony: Last night, I received an email from Susan Pinkus, the director of the LA Times Poll. She had been on vacation when my first post ran and was just catching up, and she emailed their results tabulated by ideology. In a poll conducted just days after the attacks (9/13 to 9/14) they showed roughly the same numbers of liberals (69%) and conservatives (72%) agreeing that “the United States is now in a state of war (the sampling error for those subgroups was at least 4%). In a question that forced a choice eerily similar to the rhetorical contrast offered by Rove, 68% of liberals wanted to “retaliate against bin Laden’s group through military action,” while 29% preferred that the “United States pursue justice by bringing him to trial in the United States?” Conservatives preferred war over a trial by a 72% to 22% margin.
In her email, Pinkus remarked that the in the aftermath of 9/11, “We were one America.” Yes, at the time, some liberals fit Rove’s stereotype, but the overwhelming majority did not. Following 9/11, liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans were in far more agreement about the use of military force in response to terrorism and threats abroad than they are today.
Last night, 9/11 seemed remote. Not so this morning. As we were one America four years ago, MP hopes we feel a similar solidarity with the citizens of Great Britain today. I trust few will object if I go “off topic” for a moment, but it seems appropriate to quote the words of Indian blogger Amit Varma (hat tip: Instapundit):
This isn’t just an attack on the UK, but, like the attacks of 9/11, they’re an attack on a way of life and a value-system, one that is dear not just to Western countries, but to millions in the developing world, like me. Concepts like personal freedom, equality of women and, in fact, human rights are alien to those behind the attack, and they must be defeated.
[typos corrected]
Well said. Amen, brother!
Sounds good, but it is wrong. Juan Cole’s initial reaction was to highlight Michael Scheuer’s comments:
“He said that “chickens were coming home to roost” for US and UK politicians who had obscured the nature of the al-Qaeda struggle by maintaining that the organization attacks the West because “they hate our values.”
http://www.juancole.com/2005/07/implications-of-london-bombing-attack.html
See the URL for more. We should be listening to experts like these people and not polititians who want us to believe every damn thing is some aspect of a “culture war” of one sort or another.
The problem is not that the vast majority of Democrats are patriotic or that they can be as tough as Republicans. The real issue is that the most vocal leaders of liberalism and the Democratic party portray an entirely different face to America and the world. As long as the left does not speak up against the rantings of some of their members, the rest of the country will have to take their quiet acqueisence as agreement. Whatever the pollsters have to say is pretty meaningless.
“The problem is not that the vast majority of Democrats are patriotic or that they can be as tough as Republicans. The real issue is that the most vocal leaders of liberalism and the Democratic party portray an entirely different face to America and the world.”
Which vocal leaders are those? What did they say that would “allow” Democrats to be attacked as Rove did? Not fringe people, mind you; I’m talking about mainstream, well known (you said Democratic leadership, after all) Democratic politicians who have ever said anything that a reasonable person could possibly construe as recommending “therapy” for the 9/11 attackers, or some other soft response.
Fact Checking Karl Rove
FACT CHECKING KARL ROVE….I know this is old news and doesn’t really matter much anyway — cold, hard facts are no match for incendiary rhetoric — but this is worth posting just for the record. Mark Blumenthal, after reading Karl…
“The real issue is that the most vocal leaders of liberalism and the Democratic party portray an entirely different face to America and the world.”
Alex is entirely wrong with this. It’s not that our most vocal leaders are anti-American ranters. It’s that the right-wing media only focuses on those types. O’Reilly goes on for months ranting about an obscure professor named Ward Churchill, and ignores almost everyone else. So that’s all they ever see. But who the hell is Ward Churchill to be representative of anything? Liberals didn’t pick him to be a liberal leader. Bill O’Reilly did. And he did it to fool people like Alex.
And who could actually claim that John Kerry, Harry Reid, or any actual Democrat leader is soft on terror, or didn’t support the Afghan invasion? As usual, the right has to cherry-pick the data to make their case sound plausible. But it’s not plausable. It’s a deception that is perpetrated on them daily so that they’ll demonize normal Americans who differ only slightly in their agenda.
Why is it that Alex wants Democrats to denounce what he believes are “vocal leaders of liberalism and the Democratic party” but he doesn’t call upon his own party’s leaders to denounce the crackpots on the right? Why is that DeLay, Bush, and Cheney aren’t asked to denounce the venomous attacks by right-wingers but Dem politicans are supposed to denounce attacks on Bush by left-wingers?
The very fact that the left-liberal LA Times, in its post-9/11 poll question, posed the “prosecution” option as one of the only two options America faced, helps prove that Rove had it right. The mainstream left-wing media’s first instinct was to present this silly notion as a viable option.
I would have thought because of the nature of the subject matter of this site, that people who posted here would demonstrate a certain floor level of reasoning skills. Alas…
“The very fact that the left-liberal LA Times, in its post-9/11 poll question, posed the “prosecution” option as one of the only two options America faced, helps prove that Rove had it right. The mainstream left-wing media’s first instinct was to present this silly notion as a viable option.”