I wish this had come out when I wrote my post for Monday. Call this the second part of an unintentional two part post or just a revisitation of the same subject.
At the beginning of the week, I wrote about the White House and the media's campaign to paint a return of Iraq violence to 2006 levels as an "improvement". In that post, I pointed out that this only marks progress if you define that word as one step forward after a step back. The truth is that we're right where we were last year, before a spike in violence. We haven't really gotten anywhere.
Yesterday, I came across a late-breaking poll by Pew Research that's one of those good news - bad news things. The bad news is that Bush and the media's push to recast the war as a wonderful success story is working. The good news is that it isn't making any difference.
People are evenly split over how well the military effort in Iraq is going, with 48 percent saying it is going well and the same number saying it isn't, according to a survey by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center. In February, shortly after Bush announced he would send additional troops to the country, only 30 percent said things were going well.
In only a matter of months, the Bush administration has managed to push the number of people who believe the occupation of Iraq is going well up 18% -- from a clear minority to a tie with those who believe things are bad (48% ). For warheads, the bad news is that the majority of people don't care whether it's going well or not. A bad idea is still a bad idea...
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