The questions in the Daily Kos poll were excellent examples of the "do you still beat your wife," type questions -- loaded and biased. They reminded me of the poll questions used in the late forties, when the reds took over. They were cleaned out by the returning vets.
My old friends and expatriates at No-Pasaran did an excellent biopsy of the poll. Here's a bit of it.
"Dissecting Some of the Questions that Daily Kos Asked Self-Identifed Republicans
posted by Erik @ 13:03
The Daily Kos poll of Self-Identified Republicans seems to be creating quite a stir — "The results are nothing short of startling" exclaims Markos Moulitsas Zúñiga (better known as Kos) — especially given the fact that the questions seem straight-forward.
But the Research 2000 for Daily Kos questions (1/20-31) to Self-identified Republicans (MoE 2%) are not as straight-forward as they look at first sight, and how you phrase a question can bring a vast variety in the answers. (For instance, there is a difference between asking "Do you think Bush was right to start a(n illegal) war?", "Do you think the U.S. Army was right to invade (Saddam Hussein's) Iraq?", and "Do you think the United States was right to overthrow a dictator (who had killed 300,000 of his fellow citizens)?" Note that each question changes even more by simply adding — or, alternatively, removing — the respective phrase in parentheses.)
As I will be pointing out below, the main problem here is with either-or questions in which neither option is entirely satisfactory. The answers therefore help Kos make those questioned look ridiculous. Often, by voicing a question stating the exact opposite of what the original question is saying, you sense the problem with that original question — since the (unmentioned) alternative is unpalatable, or even more unpalatable, the person questioned has little choice but to accept the question, incongruous as it may be. As a matter of fact, I have reason to believe that in any case, these questions were reframed after they were asked in order to make Republicans look ridiculous — make them look more Taliban-like — but since I have no proof of this, I do not dwell into the issue. The conclusion (as I write later on): If you really want to get to know the population or a segment thereof (rather than make a caricature of them), it makes more sense to frame your queries as if they were multiple-choice questions.
As I've mentioned before, I'm putting the finishing touches on my new book, American Taliban, which catalogues the ways in which modern-day conservatives share the same agenda as radical Jihadists in the Islamic world. "
Much more at:
http://no-pasaran.blogspot.com/An excellent example of how the left biases a poll to ensure an outcome.
Betern nuttin,
I expected better than this from you. This is more like old varmint's posts.