What The People Want

As you know I have put up my own straw poll over there ---> to try to gauge in a totally unscientific way what the mood of the country is in relation to the prospect of investigating and potentially prosecuting Bush & Co. for abuses while in office. The Ruth Marcusean Villagers of course have tried to convince all of us that the American people don't want to see them investigated and just want to move on. Of course up until now we haven't actually had any data to either disprove or back up those kinds of statements and my frustration with this is what led me to put up my own poll. Welp it seems the Washington Post/ABC News folk finally decided to pull their heads out of their arses and do a scientific nationwide poll on the issue. Glenzilla has all the ins and outs of this topic and others included in the poll but I am just going to excerpt the parts where he expounds on what the polls say about this issue.

Even more surprisingly for spouters of conventional wisdom, a majority of Americans (50-47%) believe that the Obama administration should investigate whether the Bush administration's treatment of detainees was illegal.

Thats right, a MAJORITY of Americans want to see investigations into torture. And thats not all...

Relatedly, Americans would have opposed (52-42%) the issuance of pardons by Bush to those "who carried out his administration's policy on the treatment of terrorism suspects." The poll confined itself in these questions to investigations into detainee abuse, and did not ask about investigations into other Bush crimes, such as illegal spying, obstruction of justice and various DOJ crimes.

Yes you read that right, the MAJORITY of Americans also wouldn't have wanted Bush shielding his cohorts from investigation and prosecution.

What's most remarkable about the fact that a majority of Americans favor investigations is that one has to struggle to find even a single politician of national significance or a prominent media figure who argue that position. The notion that Bush officials shouldn't be criminally investigated is about as close to a lockstep consensus among political and media elites as it gets, and yet, still, a majority of Americans favor such investigations.

Just another example of the Village and our elected officials being tone deaf to what the country wants.

UPDATE: In the last week alone, The Washington Post's David Ignatius twice said that those who advocate investigations into Bush crimes are nothing more than "liberal score-settlers." Newsweek's Jon Barry angrily accused those who advocate investigations of lying about their belief in the rule of law because (he can divine) that they are instead motivated by "vengeance, pure and simple." And yesterday, GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham claimed that it is those on what he called "the hard left" who believe in investigations.

Apparently, it is the case -- yet again -- that majorities of Americans are hard-left, score-settling, vengeance-driven liberals, who embrace views that are claimed by the Beltway to be nothing but "fringe leftist ideological rantings" (a synonym for: "those who do not believe in prevailing Beltway pieties").

Yeah, imagine that. Now its true that we shouldn't jump to conclusions based on just one poll. For all I or anybody else knows tomorrow Gallup might come out with a similar poll that has the numbers flipped. Of course the numbers could also be skewed even more in favor of investigations. But I am just happy that finally somebody had the courage to go out and get this question asked and answered by the people of this nation. At least now we have some impirical evidence of what we really think instead of having to rely on Villagers to make that call for us. And that is always a beautiful thing!