I haven’t decided which is worst, the original “nonpartisan” PIPA study, the revised PIPA study released yesterday, or Frank Davies’s hatchet job write-up of the study.

Poll: Bush faithful in own reality

Now there’s a fair and balanced headline if I never saw one.

WASHINGTON – A large majority of President George W. Bush’s supporters continue to believe that Iraq either had weapons of mass destruction (47 percent) or a major program to develop them (25 percent), contrary to official findings, a survey taken this month found.

Translated, some Bush supporters are confused, and others have had the audacity to actually read the Duelfer Report, or at least read second hand accounts of the parts Knight-Ridder doesn’t want you to read.

And three out of four Bush backers believe Saddam Hussein provided substantial support to al-Qaida or was involved in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, while 56 percent said the Sept. 11 Commission found such ties.

Translated: three out of four Bush backers either correctly believed that Saddam Hussein’s regime had repeated high-level contacts with al-Qaeda, or incorrectly believed that it played a direct role in the September 11 attacks. No, we’re not going to tell you how many fell into each separate category.

In reality, the commission found “no collaborative relationship” between Iraq and al-Qaida.

That may be true, in Knight-Ridder’s reality. In the real one, however, the 9-11 Commission’s finding was much narrower than that. The phrase “no collaborative relationship” is not a direct quote, even though it appears in quotes. What the 9-11 Commission actually said was a bit more modest than that, relating only to the contacts they had reviewed while attempting to get at the bottom of 9-11. Of those contacts they wrote:

But to date we have seen no evidence that these or the earlier contacts ever developed into a collaborative operational relationship. Nor have we seen evidence indicating that Iraq cooperated with al Qaeda in developing or carrying out any attacks against the United States.

The difference between failing to establish a colloborative operational relationship and specifically finding that none exists is hardly a matter of semantics. It’s the difference between O.J. being acquitted of murder, on the one hand, and Knight-Ridder accusing everyone who thinks he’s guilty of living in his own reality, on the other. At a minimum, Knight-Ridder should not have used quotation marks to quote what was at best a paraphrase, not a representation of what the 9-11 Commission actually said.

The survey by the University of Maryland’s Program on International Policy Attitudes, released today, shows that the supporters of Bush and Sen. John Kerry have stark differences and see “separate realities” about Iraq and other foreign policy issues.

The poll, conducted by Knowledge Networks, was taken of 968 people Oct. 12-18, after the final report by Charles Duelfer concluded that Iraq did not have a significant WMD program.

Never mind that the report also concluded that Saddam retained the scientists “needed to restart his biological weapons program,” or that he “would have been able to produce mustard agents in a period of months and nerve agent in less than a year or two. Anyone who paid attention to those portions of the Duelfer Report is just living in his own little world.

Steven Kull, program director, said that Bush supporters’ “resistance to information” on several fronts reflected a powerful bond with the president formed after the Sept. 11 attacks, and the perception – shared by Kerry supporters – that Bush still asserts that Iraq had WMD.

Either that, or it reflects PIPA’s uncanny ability to design a survey in such a way that half of the “wrong” answers aren’t wrong at all, and the other half are designed so that it’s only possible to be “wrong” in one direction. Anyone who mistook Saddam Hussein for a perfect saint – say, Michael Moore – would get a perfect score on PIPA’s test. Nope, no bias there.

Asked whether U.S. forces should have invaded Iraq if U.S. intelligence had concluded that Iraq was not making WMD or providing support to al-Qaida, 58 percent of Bush supporters said no.

Translated: if we stack the deck far enough in Howard Dean’s favor by asking conservatives to forget about Abu Musab al-Zarqawi or his Ansar al-Islam (then a loose affiliate cum competitor of al-Qaeda, now a wholly-owned subsidiary of the same), forget all those suicide bombers in Israel whose families Saddam paid off, purport to know more about the bomb in Saddam’s garden than his own scientist, Mahdi Obeidi does, and give the regime a pass for attempting to murder an ex-President and shoot at our planes almost every day – then they might conclude that maybe Saddam wasn’t such a bad guy after all.

“To support the president and to accept that he took the United States to war based on mistaken assumptions is difficult to bear, especially in light of the continuing costs in terms of lives and money,” Kull said. “Apparently, to avoid this cognitive dissonance, Bush supporters suppress awareness of unsettling information.”

Either that, or Kull fails to appreciate the difference between merely reporting the results of his allegedly scientific study, and playing pop psychologist and attemping to explain that mental disease that is conservatism.

The survey also found that Bush supporters have “numerous misperceptions” about the president’s positions. Majorities incorrectly believe that Bush backs the Kyoto global-warming treaty, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the International Criminal Court and the treaty banning land mines.

I’ll believe that data when I see it, in plain English, unfiltered by the likes of Kull or any “journalist” employed by Knight-Ridder. I know plenty of of conservatives, none of whom support Kyoto or the ICC, and very few of whom would be voting for Bush if they thought he did. It would be interesting, however, to know how many Kerry supporters falsely believe that Senatory Kerry supported Kyoto, or at least falsely assume he wasn’t among the 95 Senators who cast a preemptive vote against it in 1997. But you’ll never get information like this from PIPA or Kull, who ask only hand-picked questions that liberals can never get wrong (except, of course, by failing to be knee-jerk enough in their liberalism).

A majority of Bush backers (57 percent) also believe most people in the world favor Bush’s re-election, contrary to the findings of several polls.

I’d almost be willing to believe that one, if not for Kull and Davies’s track records thus far. Given the hatchet job they’ve done on anything else, I’m tempted to suspect Kull asked a more nuanced question, allowing anything from “the whole world supports us” to “some foreigners privately support Bush’s re-election but won’t say so publicly lest they become the next terror targets” to “Kerry has less international support than he lets on,” to “who gives a flying **** what the world thinks, do what’s right?”

Kerry supporters have a more accurate perception of their candidate’s positions, and the gulf between Kerry and Bush supporters is large, the survey found.

Gee, ya think? Thus far, neither the article nor the ultra-scientific report it quotes have identified a single question a knee-jerk Kerry supporter could possibly have gotten wrong. How asking them if Kerry invaded Cambodia at Christmas in 1968? Bonus points if they can tell who was President then, or who at least who got us into Nixon’s War. Or maybe we should ask Kerry supporters what the hell his position on Iraq is, how he voted in 1990 when every imaginable “global test” had been passed, or, given the broad range of positions Kerry has taken in a matter of months, how it is even possible to identify any respondent’s answer as an “accurate” or “inaccurate” perception of anything.

While 85 percent of Bush backers think the United States made the right decision to go to war against Iraq, only 8 percent of Kerry backers agree.

There we have it, folks. A social “scientist” disagrees with the war on Iraq, and so do 92% of Kerry supporters, ergo, Kerry supporters have their “facts” right, and Bush supporters don’t. The rest is just window dressing.

If Bush had known about the lack of WMD and substantial ties to al-Qaida, 83 percent of Kerry supporters say Bush would have gone to war for other reasons. Only 34 percent of Bush backers agree.

Yet again, a missed opportunity for liberals to get something wrong. How about a little elaboration as to what other reasons Kerry supporters think Bush would have gone to war for? Just to be generous, I’ll count any plausible answer as “right.” Those who think Bush has a long-term goal to “drain the swamp” of terrorism in the Middle East and thought Iraq’s history of broken UN resolutions gave us the best window of opportunity may be wrong, but I’ll count them as right. So too for those who think Bush knew Iraq would eventually regain its WMD, as Charles Duelfer has subsequently concluded, but thought it better to take over Iraq now, rather than face a nastier war when he had them a year or two later. Again, probably wrong, but I’ll count it as right because it could be. What I won’t count as right – and Kull almost certainly did – was any Kerry supporter who thinks Bush went to war because he was bored, to steal Iraq’s oil, to avenge his daddy, to keep the U.S. in a perpetual state of war so he could build a police state, to score a big contract for Halliburton, or for any of the other various and sundry (and, in most cases, mutually contradictory) reasons a typical Dean Kerry supporter believes Bush may have had for invading Iraq.

UPDATE: Chris Lawrence and Jon Henke have more.