Three weeks have passed since the election, and many Americans, regardless of party affiliation, have been trying to understand how 60 million Americans, give or take a few hundred thousand, could have voted for George W Bush.
Are Bush supporters stupid? To suggest so is simplistic, insulting and ultimately counterproductive.
Are Bush supporters simply misinformed? This seems to be closer to the truth.
Last month, PIPA released a new study that found majorities of Bush supporters, sometimes huge majorities, not only had major misunderstandings of the basic facts about Iraq, but they were misled on all sorts of other Bush positions. 74 percent of Bush supporters believed that Bush favors inclusion of labor and environmental standards in trade agreements.Blame the Bush administration for their policies of propaganda and deception. Blame the media for not asking tough questions. Blame voters for not paying closer attention to and being critical readers of the news of the day .
60 percent of Bush supporters said the US should not have initiated a war with Iraq unless evidence established that Iraq had WMDs and was supporting the Al Qaeda terrrorists. This should have been a bloc of Kerry voters. But they were unaware the evidence did not exist.
These are faith-based voters -- not fact-based voters.
