Saturday, November 22, 2008

Z/Z Top Poll: The Gift That Keeps on Giving

At the risk of repeating myself... wait, first let me quote more successful blogger WAMK, in his response to my previous post about the Zeigler/Zogby Poll. Note how the wording suggests that Nate Silver was right:
If the study was done to see if Obama supporters are idiots, then why would one need to poll McCain supporters?...You are unhappy with the poll, because it shows that some of the people who voted for Obama had little knowledge about the candidates, except for what was spoon fed to them by the MSM.
First let me remind you I've already acknowledged that most of Obama voters are idiots, because most of ALL people are idiots. Your man Zeigler blew a chance to "prove" that McCain voters had fewer idiots by failing to interview them as well. In the absence of data, I can conclude that that there are more of them, and that was Zeigler's strategy: to distract from how stupid his people are.  Prove me wrong! 

(By the way, the inclusion of Republican respondents isn't my idea, it's Zogby's. If he hadn't left the decision to underlings, he says he would have insisted on it.)

Second, as I pointed out, in order to get an answer "right" you have to buy into some pretty suspicious language. "82.6% could NOT correctly say that Barack Obama won his first election by getting opponents kicked off the ballot" for example, assumes you agree that's how he won that election. "88.4% could NOT correctly say that Obama said his policies would likely bankrupt the coal industry and make energy rates skyrocket" depends on you taking a remark out of context the same way Zeigler did. 

A fanciful example can be found in a faux Jane Fonda quote that the National Lampoon published in the seventies. "Poor people are poor," Fonda is made to say, "because nuclear power plants are polluting the atmosphere!" Zeigler's questions are the equivalent of "Is poverty caused by atmospheric pollution from nuclear plants?" If you answer "no," you are an idiot. OR, you're a sensible Republican.

I think the thing that is so infuriating Zeigler and WAMK is not that the majority of Obama voters are being spoon-fed information from the Main Stream media; it's that we're refusing to eat from the same spoon that they are. 

2 comments:

  1. Were any of the poll questions fair, and if so, which ones?

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  2. 200. Before this past election, which political party controlled both houses of congress?

    201. Which candidate could not say how many houses they own?

    203. Which candidate had to quit a previous political campaign because they were found to have plagiarized a speech? (BTW, I'm letting this one go even though Biden didn't plagiarize a whole speech.)

    205. Which candidate wore clothes that their political party reportedly spent $150,000 on?

    206. Which candidate currently has a pregnant teenage daughter?

    207. Which candidate said that Obama would be tested in his first six months as president by a generated international crisis?

    The rest, it seems to me, are a final attempt to advance RNC Talking Points; or rather, an extended whine that they weren't picked up by media other than Fox.

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