Ray Robison has a new article up at the American Thinker in which he takes the LA Times and Bloomberg to task for their recent poll suggesting military personnel and their families are turning against Bush:
The LA Times writes,
“Families
with ties to the military, long a reliable source of support for
wartime presidents, disapprove of President Bush and his handling of
the war in Iraq, with a majority concluding the invasion was not worth
it”.
Bloomberg claims,
“skepticism
about the war reflects a growing disenchantment within the broader
military community, long a bastion of support for the Bush
administration and Republicans. Among active-duty military, veterans
and their families, only 36 percent say it was worth going to war in
Iraq.”
But Ray notices a similiar poll at Military.com has the completely opposite result plus he notes the percentage of those polled by the LAT’s and Bloomberg appear to be quite lacking:
This poll which is being billed as a rebuke to the president by military families includes only 10% of respondents who actually claim to have a family member who is serving or has served in Iraq or Afghanistan. Therefore, the number of respondents who had family involved in Iraq specifically is even less than 10%. So the people who are supporting family members in Iraq actually had very little to do with these conclusions as a whole.
But look again at the claims from Bloomberg and the LA Times. They claim the respondents were critical over Iraq, not Afghanistan. Let’s be generous and guess that two-thirds or 100 of these respondents claimed to have a family member who served in Iraq. According to a recent USA Today article, over 1.5 million troops have served in Iraq. To try to take a poll with 100 or so respondents out of a pool of over 1.5 million is absurd.
There is no statistical validity and no way to assign any confidence to the conclusion that military family members of those who have fought in Iraq are turning against the President because of Iraq. The methodology statement notes that the margin of error for this subgroup is 8%. I would suggest it is quite a bit larger when you consider other factors.
How did they confirm that these respondents are actually military family members? What was the verification process, if any?
Additionally the poll was weighted by census portions for “national region”. Which makes no sense if your polling a specific segment of the population such as families of the military. It should be weighted to the regions by the rate of service in the military.
Weighing by overall census population means that military relatives in highly populated areas like New York City and LA, places where President Bush and the Iraq war are especially unpopular, are overrepresented compared to military families from the rural South. If this is going to be touted as a military poll it should have been conducted weighting for military families’ distribution regionally.
Finally he notes that a few of those polled who they decided to quote have some questionable backgrounds:
The LA Times quotes Mary Meneely of Arco, Minnesota who said
“The man went into Iraq without justification, without a plan; he just decided to go in there and win, and he had no idea what was going to happen,”
and then compared Iraq to Vietnam. Her son, who was an Air Force reservist wasn’t even in Iraq, but Afghanistan.
Her husband, Tom Meneely is a liberal activist who writes anti-Bush tirades to the media. He wrote to TIME magazine:
“Bush’s litany of mistakes can be defined in common terms by every kindergartner in America.”
And:
The LA Times also cites
“poll respondent Sue Datta, 61, whose youngest son, an Army staff sergeant, was seriously wounded in Iraq last year and is scheduled to redeploy in 2009.”
As an army sergeant, he would be required to have an army email account through the Army Knowledge Online portal. I have searched for “Datta” in the email address database. I found four people with the last name Datta and none matched the rank of SSG or held a rank even close to that. The most plausible match is an army Specialist which is several ranks and years junior to a staff sergeant.
It is odd that an extensive search failed to turn up any information on either Datta’s son — not even a news article about his “serious wounding” — or the Meneely’s son on the Internet. But the article doesn’t actually name either son which makes it difficult to verify their stories. I have requested confirmation from the LA Times of the identity of these military members.
All in all another shoddy job done at these two liberal rags in their continuing quest to tear down this President, at whatever cost is necessary.
But we’re not done yet. Take a look at the New York Times newest embarrassment: (via Patterico’s Pontifications)
This
should be a major embarrassment for Linda Greenhouse and the New York
Times. Her husband submits an amicus brief on behalf of GTMO detainees, and
when they win, she gushes
that the opinion “shredded each of the administration’s arguments” and was a
“sweeping and categorical defeat for the administration” thatleft human rights lawyers who have pressed this and other cases on behalf of
Guantánamo detainees almost speechless with surprise and delight, using words
like “fantastic,” “amazing” and “remarkable.”Why, my husband used all those words to me just last night . . . in
bed!
Ed Whelan, who first caught the significance of the story:
I don’t know what standards of journalistic ethics the New York Times
and Greenhouse purport to adhere to. The Code of Ethics of
the Society of Professional Journalists (which describes itself as the “nation’s
most broad-based journalism organization” and has some 9,000 members) sets forth
the proposition that journalists should “[a]void conflicts of interest, real or
perceived.” But that proposition would appear elementary for any
journalist with any claim to being objective.
Me thinks Linda has some esplaining to do.
Lastly, take a listen to David Shuster letting the facade of objectivity and unbiased reporting fall away.
So with all this criticism being leveled at Bush do you think he will run for another term?
Sigh….
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