Webloggin » Did You Know That You’re “Independent of Reality”?

It always amazes me when the AP still pretends it’s a news outlet, rather than an anti-American propaganda machine. How’s this for an article:

Do you believe in Iraqi “WMD”? Did Saddam Hussein’s government have weapons of mass destruction in 2003?

Half of America apparently still thinks so, a new poll finds, and experts see a raft of reasons why: a drumbeat of voices from talk radio to die-hard bloggers to the Oval Office, a surprise headline here or there, a rallying around a partisan flag, and a growing need for people, in their own minds, to justify the war in Iraq.

People tend to become “independent of reality” in these circumstances, says opinion analyst Steven Kull.

The reality in this case is that after a 16-month, $900-million-plus investigation, the U.S. weapons hunters known as the Iraq Survey Group declared that Iraq had dismantled its chemical, biological and nuclear arms programs in 1991 under U.N. oversight. That finding in 2004 reaffirmed the work of U.N. inspectors who in 2002-03 found no trace of banned arsenals in Iraq.

Maybe the reality is that Americans know (a) that Iraq probably shipped WMD’s to Syria in the long build-up to war the UN demanded, (b) that Iraq had situated itself with preliminary weapons systems that, in a heartbeat, it could transform into WMDS, and (c) that hundreds of weapons, all with devastating capacity, have in fact been located in Iraq, although the press seldom covers these findings. And that’s just off the top of my head. I guess it all depends on what your definition of WMDs is, and whether you care whether they’re actually found, or are just concerned (as I am) that they actually existed, or could imminently exist, with a megalomaniac’s hand on the trigger.

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