It's like OJ all over again ...
You've got to read these numbers cited at AntiWar.com.
Unbelievable.
But the article also contradicts the conclusion I drew in a recent blog post, that the hawks don't care about justifying the slaughter:
Calling it denial is itself a form of denial. We don't want to believe that these people could be such monsters.
Unbelievable.
But the article also contradicts the conclusion I drew in a recent blog post, that the hawks don't care about justifying the slaughter:
"Another reason that Bush supporters may hold to these beliefs is that they have not accepted the idea that it does not matter whether Iraq had WMD or supported al Qaeda. Here too they are in agreement with Kerry supporters."That's a very awkward double negative, so let me translate: Bush supporters apparently do care about the legitimacy of going to war. I have come to believe the opposite about them.
Asked whether the US should have gone to war with Iraq if US intelligence had concluded that Iraq was not making WMD or providing support to al Qaeda, 58% of Bush supporters said the US should not have, and 61% assume that in this case the President would not have. Kull continues, "To support the president and to accept that he took the US to war based on mistaken assumptions likely creates substantial cognitive dissonance, and leads Bush supporters to suppress awareness of unsettling information about prewar Iraq."I'm willing to believe that plenty of it is dissonance and denial, but that seems like an untestable hypothesis. How can you tell the difference between a person who is unmoved by evidence because the evidence is irrelevant to them and a person who is unmoved by evidence because they're emotionally incapable of accepting the evidence?
Calling it denial is itself a form of denial. We don't want to believe that these people could be such monsters.
1 Comments:
I'm thinking of the Bushies that I know, because, as you say, it's impossible to tell if a person is unmoved by evidence because the evidence is irrelevant to them or a person is unmoved by evidence because they're emotionally incapable of accepting the evidence.I think the evidence matters, because they think of themselves as good people. If they accepted the evidence, they would have to acknowledge their monstrous, bloody role in a bad thing, and they can't bring themselves to do it, so they're desperately holding out for favorable evidence. That's also one of the reasons they go into attack mode when unfavorable evidence is pointed out - because it's personal to them. You are trying to prove that they are bad; you're attacking them, so they hit back.
Does that work?
tex
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