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Forums - General - Fox News tops source of voter misinformation

GameOver22 on 18 December 2010
Kasz216 said:
GameOver22 said:
Kasz216 said:
GameOver22 said:
Kasz216 said:
Tigerlure said:
Kasz216 said:
GameOver22 said:

I can't say the results of the study surprise me much because voters are generally uniformed about political issues, but the level of misinformation is concerning. There is a difference between not knowing an answer and believing a wrong answer to be true.


The very first thing you learn when you take a research class is that people HATE saying "I don't know."

You could make up a question that his completly fictional like


"Did Alexander the Great say his favorite color was Red or Blue" and a great number of people will say either Red or Blue, even though such an event never occured.

Are you assuming that there is no "correct" answer in these questions asked?  And to your wired article, it says that they could be remnants of the gulf war, so that isn't good proof at all of WMDs found.

"But chemical weapons, especially, did not vanish from the Iraqi battlefield. Remnants of Saddam’s toxic arsenal, largely destroyed after the Gulf War, remained."

Does that justify the invasion of Iraq to you?

The finding of WMD's isn't proof of WMD's?  They found chemical weapons of mass destruction that according to the deals with the UN were supposed to be destroyed.  This is fairly similar to "Did the Stimulus save jobs."   Someone who thinks "It saved those jobs, but prevented new jobs from being created" very well may say no. 

Just as you are indicating you would say no, after directly reading something that says they found weapons of mass destruction.  Did they find weapons of mass destruction "no because they were old weapons of mass destruction."  I mean... what?

Does that justify the invasion of Iraq to me?  No, but they could of found a Nuclear program and that wouldn't of justified it, at best a Clinton age "Bomb the shit out of them until they let us do what they want" campaign would of sufficed.

 

Also, you miss my point.  Which is that if people don't know the answer to something, they are most likely going to guess.  (Furthermore said guess will play into their own biases.  People who like Red better will say that's his favorite color.)


Your link got me more intersted in this topic, so I did a little research. I personally don't think the question, "Were there WMDs in Iraq?", is a fair question without specifying what constitutes a WMD. By the dictionary definition, the wikileaks articles shows that WMDs were found, but by international or governmental standards, I'm not sure if these finding would constitue WMDs because it is unclear if the weapons had the ability to cause significant damage or mass casualties. In order to be a WMD, at least under some definitions, its not enough for something to be a chemical weapon. Weapons also needs to have the capability to cause significant damage. This relates to the quantity of the weapon, dispersal, as well as the ability to utilize the weapon.

http://www.nti.org/f_wmd411/f1a1.html

They are classified as WMDs internationally....

Your link seems to confirm that they were WMDs.... not Deny it.

These are the two defintions I was looking at. Under these defintions, I don't see how the wikileaks article show that these weapons had the ability to cause significant damage, mass casualties, etc.

1. U.S. Department of Defense, Proliferation Threat and Response 2001, "Message of the Secretary of Defense," refers to weapons of mass destruction as those with "...capabilities to inflict mass casualties and destruction: nuclear, biological and chemical (NBC) weapons or the means to deliver them."

2. The definition in the U.S. Code, Title 50, "War and National Defense," includes radiological weapons. It defines WMD as "any weapon or device that is intended, or has the capability, to cause death or serious bodily injury to a significant number of people through the release, dissemination, or impact of - (A) toxic or poisonous chemicals or their precursors; (B) a disease organism; or (C) radiation or radioactivity."

They were chemical weapons with the abiltity to cause serious bodily injury to a significant number of people.

That's specifically what they found.


Rereading the article, I don't see anything that makes that claim. The article is very vague, and when it does mention the quantity of weapons found, it hardly seems enough to cause mass casualties. Even if the article does show that there were WMDs in Iraq though, this does not show that WMDs were possessed and capable of use by the government- this is really the more relevant question and probably the better question to ask in a poll.

Edit: Quite a few of the links in the article don't even work, at least for me.



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Kasz216 on 18 December 2010
GameOver22 said:
Kasz216 said:
GameOver22 said:
Kasz216 said:
GameOver22 said:
Kasz216 said:
Tigerlure said:
Kasz216 said:
GameOver22 said:

I can't say the results of the study surprise me much because voters are generally uniformed about political issues, but the level of misinformation is concerning. There is a difference between not knowing an answer and believing a wrong answer to be true.


The very first thing you learn when you take a research class is that people HATE saying "I don't know."

You could make up a question that his completly fictional like


"Did Alexander the Great say his favorite color was Red or Blue" and a great number of people will say either Red or Blue, even though such an event never occured.

Are you assuming that there is no "correct" answer in these questions asked?  And to your wired article, it says that they could be remnants of the gulf war, so that isn't good proof at all of WMDs found.

"But chemical weapons, especially, did not vanish from the Iraqi battlefield. Remnants of Saddam’s toxic arsenal, largely destroyed after the Gulf War, remained."

Does that justify the invasion of Iraq to you?

The finding of WMD's isn't proof of WMD's?  They found chemical weapons of mass destruction that according to the deals with the UN were supposed to be destroyed.  This is fairly similar to "Did the Stimulus save jobs."   Someone who thinks "It saved those jobs, but prevented new jobs from being created" very well may say no. 

Just as you are indicating you would say no, after directly reading something that says they found weapons of mass destruction.  Did they find weapons of mass destruction "no because they were old weapons of mass destruction."  I mean... what?

Does that justify the invasion of Iraq to me?  No, but they could of found a Nuclear program and that wouldn't of justified it, at best a Clinton age "Bomb the shit out of them until they let us do what they want" campaign would of sufficed.

 

Also, you miss my point.  Which is that if people don't know the answer to something, they are most likely going to guess.  (Furthermore said guess will play into their own biases.  People who like Red better will say that's his favorite color.)


Your link got me more intersted in this topic, so I did a little research. I personally don't think the question, "Were there WMDs in Iraq?", is a fair question without specifying what constitutes a WMD. By the dictionary definition, the wikileaks articles shows that WMDs were found, but by international or governmental standards, I'm not sure if these finding would constitue WMDs because it is unclear if the weapons had the ability to cause significant damage or mass casualties. In order to be a WMD, at least under some definitions, its not enough for something to be a chemical weapon. Weapons also needs to have the capability to cause significant damage. This relates to the quantity of the weapon, dispersal, as well as the ability to utilize the weapon.

http://www.nti.org/f_wmd411/f1a1.html

They are classified as WMDs internationally....

Your link seems to confirm that they were WMDs.... not Deny it.

These are the two defintions I was looking at. Under these defintions, I don't see how the wikileaks article show that these weapons had the ability to cause significant damage, mass casualties, etc.

1. U.S. Department of Defense, Proliferation Threat and Response 2001, "Message of the Secretary of Defense," refers to weapons of mass destruction as those with "...capabilities to inflict mass casualties and destruction: nuclear, biological and chemical (NBC) weapons or the means to deliver them."

2. The definition in the U.S. Code, Title 50, "War and National Defense," includes radiological weapons. It defines WMD as "any weapon or device that is intended, or has the capability, to cause death or serious bodily injury to a significant number of people through the release, dissemination, or impact of - (A) toxic or poisonous chemicals or their precursors; (B) a disease organism; or (C) radiation or radioactivity."

They were chemical weapons with the abiltity to cause serious bodily injury to a significant number of people.

That's specifically what they found.


Rereading the article, I don't see anything that makes that claim. The article is very vague, and when it does mention the quantity of weapons found, it hardly seems enough to cause mass casualties. Even if the article does show that there were WMDs in Iraq though, this does not show that WMDs were possessed and capable of use by the government- this is really the more relevant question and probably the better question to ask in a poll.

Edit: Quite a few of the links in the article don't even work, at least for me.

It's poisoous gas canisers... there is no such thing as a percise poison gas canister.



whatever on 18 December 2010
Kasz216 said:
GameOver22 said:
Kasz216 said:

They were chemical weapons with the abiltity to cause serious bodily injury to a significant number of people.

That's specifically what they found.


Rereading the article, I don't see anything that makes that claim. The article is very vague, and when it does mention the quantity of weapons found, it hardly seems enough to cause mass casualties. Even if the article does show that there were WMDs in Iraq though, this does not show that WMDs were possessed and capable of use by the government- this is really the more relevant question and probably the better question to ask in a poll.

Edit: Quite a few of the links in the article don't even work, at least for me.

It's poisoous gas canisers... there is no such thing as a percise poison gas canister.

Considering that for months before the invasion of Iraq, all we heard about and saw were mushroom clouds and an emminent nuclear attack from Iraq giving nukes to Al Quaeda, this hardly qualifies as the WMD used to justify the war.  I have fertilizer in my garage, I guess I have WMD also.



Mendicate Bias on 19 December 2010
mhsillen said:
Mendicate Bias said:

I'm going to go with the Universities direct statement on his status instead of a news outlet. The reason i even bothered stating that is because another user was stating fallacies about him that could be proven wrong. 

What do you have against professors? You do realize that the computer your sitting on, the medicine you take, the surgeries you have and your life of comfort is all because of people that were involved in academia and the sciences. This stupid view that uneducated people know more about a subject than a scientist in the same field is the reason why our country is falling so far behind in education and science.

I hate people that try to play off their opinions as facts even though they don't know the first thing about the subject, a good example being evolution or economics.

I see your an expert on everything.  He is not a professor 

And I don't need you to tell me what professors have done in the past. 

I do know that a lot of them lack real world experience. Everything in the classroom is perfect and antiseptic and all of their ideas come to fruition.  But drag it out of the classroom and it isn't so perfect anymore.

President Obama was not vetted and now he looks lost.  And without his teleprompter he sounds just as dumb as Bush did. And the my point stands  press did not do the job they were supposed to do.  The only outlet that did a half hearted attempt was Fox news.  

And I won't even comment on the job cnn,msnbc did on the mid-term elections.  Fox news was balanced out with libs and Conservatives.  While MSNBC were like walking into a drunk frat party

 

So your argument is no he's not but I'm not going to show you any proof. Despite the fact that I linked you to the University of Chicago Law School where they explicitly say that he is a professor. 

My argument isn't how good of a job Obama is doing. My argument is that you are either making up facts or twisting them to suite your political view.

So what professors do doesn't apply to the real world? How about you stop taking you antibiotics then. Actually you know what, how about you get off the internet. It can't be that good since a professor at some stupid stuck up college at MIT helped to invent it. 

I have given you the facts now give me yours. Show me proof that Obama is not a professor, show me proof that Bush released his university transcripts. What it looks like to me is that your someone that never attended a 4 year university and is looking in from the outside judging something you don't even understand.



                                           

                      The definitive evidence that video games turn people into mass murderers

Killiana1a on 19 December 2010
Baalzamon said:
Killiana1a said:
Kasz216 said:
Killiana1a said:
badgenome said:

No, Juan Williams doesn't make you balanced. But between Juan Williams, Kirsten Powers, Alan Colmes, Susan Estrich, Bob Beckel, Geraldine Ferraro, Alicia Menendez, Ellis Henican, et al, Fox is easily more balanced than either CNN (whose idea of a conservative is Kathleen Parker) or MSNBC (whose idea of a conservative is probably Dennis Kucinich).

By all means, hold everyone accountable. But all complaints about how shitty the media in general, and cable news in particular, is seem to start and end with Fox News. Granted, they are the ratings leader by lightyears, but no one seriously thinks that's why they're the whipping boy. Nor are they especially bad as far as cable news goes. It's because and only because they dare to lean the other way.

Problem is, all those you listed as progressive are contributors who come in for 2 to 5 minutes at a time.

Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly, and Sean Hannity are all conservative and the biggest draws to Fox News in their time slots. Where are their progressive counterparts who have a 1 hour prime time television slot on Fox News?

What about that is different from MSNBC?

Nothing. According to the survey in the original OP, MSNBC is by the least watched news network with Fox News being number 1. I will concede MSNBC has emulated Fox News by trying to be the liberal Fox News with Olbermann, Maddow, Matthews, and that crazy guy, yet they still are miles away from CNN and hundres of miles away from Fox News' heels in the ratings race.

Unfair comparison. Fox News by far is the most watched news network. They are more comparable to NY Times and the Washington Post as far as news media goes. Comparing Fox to MSNBC or CNN is like comparing the NY Times to the East Oregonian. You cannot compare the echelon with the gutter.

Personally, as a far Left progressive my preferred news channel is Fox News. They have the hottest news anchors like Megyn Kelly as Howard Stern will attest to. Furthermore, working 10pm to 6am and getting all my media online I watch them for opposition research and for entertainment in how they twist a story by the very words they use such as "Government Option" instead of "Public Option," which their focus group pollster, Frank Luntz stated support is split 50/50 if the "Public Option" would have been used during the 2010 healthcare debate, while using "Government Option" skews Fox News voters more to 70/30 opposed.

See the problem with what you are saying is that it isn't an unfair comparison.  We have had several comments in this thread saying they should have liberal counterparts on FoxNews, when none of the liberal stations have conservative counterparts (they may refer to them as conservative...but they aren't).

Channel for channel or radio show for radio show just opens an endless discussion.

Regarding cable news, Fox News is the most watched in their prime time spots. Then again, if we combined the viewership of CNN and MSNBC for those same time slots, then we could argue there should be another Fox News.

Regarding radio, every single wannabe counterpart to Rush Limbaugh has failed. Air America and Al Franken's show being the latest. Then again, the publicly funded NPR is fairly Left leaning in terms of their on air commentary.

Regarding blogs, I would dare to say the Left is more entrenched and more adept than the Right. Then again, the Tea Party movement communicates and coordinates via Twitter overwhelmingly.

In a capitalistic society where a public personality becomes successful pitching to a certain crowd, it is a given a lot of individuals will lose their audience. Reasons?

I don't believe it is that Rush Limbaugh's views are more representative than Keith Olbermann's views.

It is more about lifestyle than your views being more representative. Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck garner the largest radio audience because their views are well pitched to rural and suburban folk who commute via car to work everyday. Al Franken and Air America are more urbanized and if you have spent anytime living in a big city like I have, driving to work is not the sole option.Plenty ride bicycles or take mass transit where there is no radio. If your message is pitched to this bicycle and mass transit riding audience, then you will have a hard time staying in business.

As for counter for counter, we will never have it in US society regarding politics and media and I am just fine with it. I don't want the US Government to come in and mandate 50/50 progressive and conservative on any air wave be it radio, television, print, or online.



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Kasz216 on 19 December 2010
whatever said:
Kasz216 said:
GameOver22 said:
Kasz216 said:

They were chemical weapons with the abiltity to cause serious bodily injury to a significant number of people.

That's specifically what they found.


Rereading the article, I don't see anything that makes that claim. The article is very vague, and when it does mention the quantity of weapons found, it hardly seems enough to cause mass casualties. Even if the article does show that there were WMDs in Iraq though, this does not show that WMDs were possessed and capable of use by the government- this is really the more relevant question and probably the better question to ask in a poll.

Edit: Quite a few of the links in the article don't even work, at least for me.

It's poisoous gas canisers... there is no such thing as a percise poison gas canister.

Considering that for months before the invasion of Iraq, all we heard about and saw were mushroom clouds and an emminent nuclear attack from Iraq giving nukes to Al Quaeda, this hardly qualifies as the WMD used to justify the war.  I have fertilizer in my garage, I guess I have WMD also.

A) Irrelevent to the mentioning above... again your answering the way you are only shows how bias can actually overpower being illinformed.

B) So, you need proof of the stuff that they use to make Nuclear bombs?

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/07/world/africa/07iht-iraq.4.14301928.htm?_r=1

Wasn't in the position to be a bomb, but as you know, yellowcake can be refined into a bomb.  This was all stuff Sadam was supposed to have disposed of.  Not the "extra" stuff bush thought they were getting, but something VERY dangerous that he wasn't supposed to have for sure.

If you thought it was worth it going to war with Sadam because he was pursueing nukes all you can really do is blame Bush for jumping the gun.

Not that it's  justifcation for the war in the first place... since we could of accmplished stopping a weapons program via bombing campaign.  Clinton knew how to handle these matters... he was in like 3 wars... and he solved them all via just bombing the crap out of our enemies until they gave in.   Cost Effective, low risk, and we have loads of bombs we aren't ever going to use anyway.  (Though he really shouldn't of used the cluster bombs...)

C) Comparing mustard gas to pesticide... seriously?



Baalzamon on 19 December 2010
Killiana1a said:
Baalzamon said:
Killiana1a said:
Kasz216 said:
Killiana1a said:
badgenome said:

No, Juan Williams doesn't make you balanced. But between Juan Williams, Kirsten Powers, Alan Colmes, Susan Estrich, Bob Beckel, Geraldine Ferraro, Alicia Menendez, Ellis Henican, et al, Fox is easily more balanced than either CNN (whose idea of a conservative is Kathleen Parker) or MSNBC (whose idea of a conservative is probably Dennis Kucinich).

By all means, hold everyone accountable. But all complaints about how shitty the media in general, and cable news in particular, is seem to start and end with Fox News. Granted, they are the ratings leader by lightyears, but no one seriously thinks that's why they're the whipping boy. Nor are they especially bad as far as cable news goes. It's because and only because they dare to lean the other way.

Problem is, all those you listed as progressive are contributors who come in for 2 to 5 minutes at a time.

Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly, and Sean Hannity are all conservative and the biggest draws to Fox News in their time slots. Where are their progressive counterparts who have a 1 hour prime time television slot on Fox News?

What about that is different from MSNBC?

Nothing. According to the survey in the original OP, MSNBC is by the least watched news network with Fox News being number 1. I will concede MSNBC has emulated Fox News by trying to be the liberal Fox News with Olbermann, Maddow, Matthews, and that crazy guy, yet they still are miles away from CNN and hundres of miles away from Fox News' heels in the ratings race.

Unfair comparison. Fox News by far is the most watched news network. They are more comparable to NY Times and the Washington Post as far as news media goes. Comparing Fox to MSNBC or CNN is like comparing the NY Times to the East Oregonian. You cannot compare the echelon with the gutter.

Personally, as a far Left progressive my preferred news channel is Fox News. They have the hottest news anchors like Megyn Kelly as Howard Stern will attest to. Furthermore, working 10pm to 6am and getting all my media online I watch them for opposition research and for entertainment in how they twist a story by the very words they use such as "Government Option" instead of "Public Option," which their focus group pollster, Frank Luntz stated support is split 50/50 if the "Public Option" would have been used during the 2010 healthcare debate, while using "Government Option" skews Fox News voters more to 70/30 opposed.

See the problem with what you are saying is that it isn't an unfair comparison.  We have had several comments in this thread saying they should have liberal counterparts on FoxNews, when none of the liberal stations have conservative counterparts (they may refer to them as conservative...but they aren't).

Channel for channel or radio show for radio show just opens an endless discussion.

Regarding cable news, Fox News is the most watched in their prime time spots. Then again, if we combined the viewership of CNN and MSNBC for those same time slots, then we could argue there should be another Fox News.

Regarding radio, every single wannabe counterpart to Rush Limbaugh has failed. Air America and Al Franken's show being the latest. Then again, the publicly funded NPR is fairly Left leaning in terms of their on air commentary.

Regarding blogs, I would dare to say the Left is more entrenched and more adept than the Right. Then again, the Tea Party movement communicates and coordinates via Twitter overwhelmingly.

In a capitalistic society where a public personality becomes successful pitching to a certain crowd, it is a given a lot of individuals will lose their audience. Reasons?

I don't believe it is that Rush Limbaugh's views are more representative than Keith Olbermann's views.

It is more about lifestyle than your views being more representative. Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck garner the largest radio audience because their views are well pitched to rural and suburban folk who commute via car to work everyday. Al Franken and Air America are more urbanized and if you have spent anytime living in a big city like I have, driving to work is not the sole option.Plenty ride bicycles or take mass transit where there is no radio. If your message is pitched to this bicycle and mass transit riding audience, then you will have a hard time staying in business.

As for counter for counter, we will never have it in US society regarding politics and media and I am just fine with it. I don't want the US Government to come in and mandate 50/50 progressive and conservative on any air wave be it radio, television, print, or online.

Radio is actually quite a bit different though, I've heard a stat that there's something like 85% conservatives that do talk shows.  I personally like listening to dave ramsey to hear how stupid the people are and how on earth they got in that much debt.



Money can't buy happiness. Just video games, which make me happy.

Killiana1a on 20 December 2010
Baalzamon said:
Killiana1a said:
Baalzamon said:
Killiana1a said:
Kasz216 said:
Killiana1a said:
badgenome said:

No, Juan Williams doesn't make you balanced. But between Juan Williams, Kirsten Powers, Alan Colmes, Susan Estrich, Bob Beckel, Geraldine Ferraro, Alicia Menendez, Ellis Henican, et al, Fox is easily more balanced than either CNN (whose idea of a conservative is Kathleen Parker) or MSNBC (whose idea of a conservative is probably Dennis Kucinich).

By all means, hold everyone accountable. But all complaints about how shitty the media in general, and cable news in particular, is seem to start and end with Fox News. Granted, they are the ratings leader by lightyears, but no one seriously thinks that's why they're the whipping boy. Nor are they especially bad as far as cable news goes. It's because and only because they dare to lean the other way.

Problem is, all those you listed as progressive are contributors who come in for 2 to 5 minutes at a time.

Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly, and Sean Hannity are all conservative and the biggest draws to Fox News in their time slots. Where are their progressive counterparts who have a 1 hour prime time television slot on Fox News?

What about that is different from MSNBC?

Nothing. According to the survey in the original OP, MSNBC is by the least watched news network with Fox News being number 1. I will concede MSNBC has emulated Fox News by trying to be the liberal Fox News with Olbermann, Maddow, Matthews, and that crazy guy, yet they still are miles away from CNN and hundres of miles away from Fox News' heels in the ratings race.

Unfair comparison. Fox News by far is the most watched news network. They are more comparable to NY Times and the Washington Post as far as news media goes. Comparing Fox to MSNBC or CNN is like comparing the NY Times to the East Oregonian. You cannot compare the echelon with the gutter.

Personally, as a far Left progressive my preferred news channel is Fox News. They have the hottest news anchors like Megyn Kelly as Howard Stern will attest to. Furthermore, working 10pm to 6am and getting all my media online I watch them for opposition research and for entertainment in how they twist a story by the very words they use such as "Government Option" instead of "Public Option," which their focus group pollster, Frank Luntz stated support is split 50/50 if the "Public Option" would have been used during the 2010 healthcare debate, while using "Government Option" skews Fox News voters more to 70/30 opposed.

See the problem with what you are saying is that it isn't an unfair comparison.  We have had several comments in this thread saying they should have liberal counterparts on FoxNews, when none of the liberal stations have conservative counterparts (they may refer to them as conservative...but they aren't).

Channel for channel or radio show for radio show just opens an endless discussion.

Regarding cable news, Fox News is the most watched in their prime time spots. Then again, if we combined the viewership of CNN and MSNBC for those same time slots, then we could argue there should be another Fox News.

Regarding radio, every single wannabe counterpart to Rush Limbaugh has failed. Air America and Al Franken's show being the latest. Then again, the publicly funded NPR is fairly Left leaning in terms of their on air commentary.

Regarding blogs, I would dare to say the Left is more entrenched and more adept than the Right. Then again, the Tea Party movement communicates and coordinates via Twitter overwhelmingly.

In a capitalistic society where a public personality becomes successful pitching to a certain crowd, it is a given a lot of individuals will lose their audience. Reasons?

I don't believe it is that Rush Limbaugh's views are more representative than Keith Olbermann's views.

It is more about lifestyle than your views being more representative. Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck garner the largest radio audience because their views are well pitched to rural and suburban folk who commute via car to work everyday. Al Franken and Air America are more urbanized and if you have spent anytime living in a big city like I have, driving to work is not the sole option.Plenty ride bicycles or take mass transit where there is no radio. If your message is pitched to this bicycle and mass transit riding audience, then you will have a hard time staying in business.

As for counter for counter, we will never have it in US society regarding politics and media and I am just fine with it. I don't want the US Government to come in and mandate 50/50 progressive and conservative on any air wave be it radio, television, print, or online.

Radio is actually quite a bit different though, I've heard a stat that there's something like 85% conservatives that do talk shows.  I personally like listening to dave ramsey to hear how stupid the people are and how on earth they got in that much debt.

The rural and suburban vs. urban divide in politics. Conservatives tend to live in areas where driving to work or getting one's necessities is a daily part of life. Progressives tend to congregate in urban metros and state capitols where transportation is more bicycle friendly and mass transit funds to get the most bang for the buck.

Considering this, I am not surprised Conservatives dominate radio.



GameOver22 on 20 December 2010
Kasz216 said:
whatever said:
Kasz216 said:
GameOver22 said:
Kasz216 said:

They were chemical weapons with the abiltity to cause serious bodily injury to a significant number of people.

That's specifically what they found.


Rereading the article, I don't see anything that makes that claim. The article is very vague, and when it does mention the quantity of weapons found, it hardly seems enough to cause mass casualties. Even if the article does show that there were WMDs in Iraq though, this does not show that WMDs were possessed and capable of use by the government- this is really the more relevant question and probably the better question to ask in a poll.

Edit: Quite a few of the links in the article don't even work, at least for me.

It's poisoous gas canisers... there is no such thing as a percise poison gas canister.

Considering that for months before the invasion of Iraq, all we heard about and saw were mushroom clouds and an emminent nuclear attack from Iraq giving nukes to Al Quaeda, this hardly qualifies as the WMD used to justify the war.  I have fertilizer in my garage, I guess I have WMD also.

A) Irrelevent to the mentioning above... again your answering the way you are only shows how bias can actually overpower being illinformed.

B) So, you need proof of the stuff that they use to make Nuclear bombs?

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/07/world/africa/07iht-iraq.4.14301928.htm?_r=1

Wasn't in the position to be a bomb, but as you know, yellowcake can be refined into a bomb.  This was all stuff Sadam was supposed to have disposed of.  Not the "extra" stuff bush thought they were getting, but something VERY dangerous that he wasn't supposed to have for sure.

If you thought it was worth it going to war with Sadam because he was pursueing nukes all you can really do is blame Bush for jumping the gun.

Not that it's  justifcation for the war in the first place... since we could of accmplished stopping a weapons program via bombing campaign.  Clinton knew how to handle these matters... he was in like 3 wars... and he solved them all via just bombing the crap out of our enemies until they gave in.   Cost Effective, low risk, and we have loads of bombs we aren't ever going to use anyway.  (Though he really shouldn't of used the cluster bombs...)

C) Comparing mustard gas to pesticide... seriously?


I don't want to keep reviving this topic, but I found an interview on npr with a US/UN weapons inspector talking about the supposed WMDs found in Iraq. His point was that the chemical weapons found were almost 20 years old (remnants from the Iran-Iraq War), degraded, and decayed. He says they constitute a local hazard and could be dangerous but do not constitute WMDs. The radio interview is from 2006, but it also seems to apply to the weapons discussed in the wikileaks article because both sources are talking about remnants from the Iran-Iraq War and not newly developed chemical weapons.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5504298



mhsillen on 20 December 2010
Mendicate Bias said:
mhsillen said:
Mendicate Bias said:

I'm going to go with the Universities direct statement on his status instead of a news outlet. The reason i even bothered stating that is because another user was stating fallacies about him that could be proven wrong. 

What do you have against professors? You do realize that the computer your sitting on, the medicine you take, the surgeries you have and your life of comfort is all because of people that were involved in academia and the sciences. This stupid view that uneducated people know more about a subject than a scientist in the same field is the reason why our country is falling so far behind in education and science.

I hate people that try to play off their opinions as facts even though they don't know the first thing about the subject, a good example being evolution or economics.

I see your an expert on everything.  He is not a professor 

And I don't need you to tell me what professors have done in the past. 

I do know that a lot of them lack real world experience. Everything in the classroom is perfect and antiseptic and all of their ideas come to fruition.  But drag it out of the classroom and it isn't so perfect anymore.

President Obama was not vetted and now he looks lost.  And without his teleprompter he sounds just as dumb as Bush did. And the my point stands  press did not do the job they were supposed to do.  The only outlet that did a half hearted attempt was Fox news.  

And I won't even comment on the job cnn,msnbc did on the mid-term elections.  Fox news was balanced out with libs and Conservatives.  While MSNBC were like walking into a drunk frat party

 

So your argument is no he's not but I'm not going to show you any proof. Despite the fact that I linked you to the University of Chicago Law School where they explicitly say that he is a professor. 

My argument isn't how good of a job Obama is doing. My argument is that you are either making up facts or twisting them to suite your political view.

So what professors do doesn't apply to the real world? How about you stop taking you antibiotics then. Actually you know what, how about you get off the internet. It can't be that good since a professor at some stupid stuck up college at MIT helped to invent it. 

I have given you the facts now give me yours. Show me proof that Obama is not a professor, show me proof that Bush released his university transcripts. What it looks like to me is that your someone that never attended a 4 year university and is looking in from the outside judging something you don't even understan

Your right he is called by the college a professor 

http://www.factcheck.org/askfactcheck/was_barack_obama_really_a_constitutional_law.html

Looks like they updated his resume to reflect his outstanding credentials