Posted by
Playful Walrus on Thursday, April 26, 2007 9:35:57 AM
I saw a poll that a Los Angeles television station did that said, in the wake of pet food contamination, 91% of the respondents said that the FDA should "do more" to protect the human and pet food supply.
How many of those people have a good idea what the FDA does and does not do, and how it does it? It is so easy to say that "someone else" should "do more" when something happens that we don't like. The police should do more about crime. The schools should more about kids not learning. Sanjaya Malakar should do more to help malaria-stricken kids in Africa. Celine Dion should take a kayak to rescue orphans drowing in Angelina Jolie's pool.
But what do these polls really mean? I know we live in a democratic republic, but how many of those respondents will actually vote or will vote in a way that is relevant to their opinion on that issue?
A NBC/Universal/WallStreetJournal says that a majority of Americans think that it will be "impossible to win the war in Iraq," or something along those lines. Really? How informed are these people? Most of them don't know more than what they've seen in a headline and the cursory coverage provided by the old media news, and maybe that the Dixie Chicks have said. They are not intelligence experts. They are not historians. They are not military strategists.
If the poll had been done like the global warming polls, they would have polled the experts - the military leaders - and the conclusion would have been overwhelmingly positive.
The truth is, we already largely won in Iraq. We removed that genocidal tyrant Saddam. We no longer have a country with a rogue government that is hostile to us and working on WMD programs. Are the deluded Islamofascist terrorists carrying out bombings? Yes. But have you been through some of our gang-infested neighborhood in the states?
The answer isn't to pull out and let genocidal maniacs throw the entire country into chaos, and then to have the country and all of its resources to fall into the hands of an Islamofascist regime bent on sponsoring terrorism and pursuing WMD. If our troops shouldn't be there, where should they be?