The Church of Bush

From before the election but still true.

As frightening as it is to contemplate a government that believes it can reframe reality to suit its own ends, we now have confirmation of the degree to which its supporters have swallowed (and thereby encouraged) this propaganda. A new study by the nonpartisan Program on International Policy Attitudes (affiliated with the University of Maryland) demonstrates what many of us have intuited for some time: support for George W. Bush is dependent upon a constellation of perceptions about the world that are all demonstrably false.

The statistics PIPA reports are not merely frightening; they are the stuff of nightmares:

“Even after the final report of Charles Duelfer to Congress saying that Iraq did not have a significant WMD program, 72% of Bush supporters continue to believe that Iraq had actual WMD (47%) or a major program for developing them (25%). Fifty-six percent assume that most experts believe Iraq had actual WMD and 57% also assume, incorrectly, that Duelfer concluded Iraq had at least a major WMD program. Kerry supporters hold opposite beliefs on all these points.

Similarly, 75% of Bush supporters continue to believe that Iraq was providing substantial support to al Qaeda, and 63% believe that clear evidence of this support has been found. Sixty percent of Bush supporters assume that this is also the conclusion of most experts, and 55% assume, incorrectly, that this was the conclusion of the 9/11 Commission. Here again, large majorities of Kerry supporters have exactly opposite perceptions.”

The PIPA study confirms what has been anecdotally obvious for some time. Attempts to remove the scales from the eyes of the Bush supporters generally fail because the conversation breaks down so quickly into fact vs. fantasy. We point to failure after failure, error upon error, lie after lie, yet reason gains no purchase on minds closed to all such evidence. In the other America, facts and logic simply don’t count.