"What kind of country goes to war whispering 'yes' into a telephone?"

Taibbi's back:

It seems fairly obvious that, in the course of the last few years, roughly 25-30 percent of the country has been influenced by the steady issue of news about increased violence and instability in Iraq. Apparently, a large percentage of Americans who supported the war two years ago have since become freaked out by the fact that, surprise, surprise, people are dying.

Which invites the question: If these people can't handle a few bad headlines, what exactly was their level of commitment to begin with? Pre-war polls, confined to the standard Coke-Pepsi either-or formula, didn't tell us much about that.

Maybe if the polls back then had been conducted differently, we might have had different results. Imagine a March 2003 poll that posed the following questions:

Would you yank your son out of college and send him to die for this bullshit?

Would you yourself be willing to give your life for this cause? If yes, grab your shit; there's a bus outside.

Those should be the only kinds of polls we allow, when it comes to questions of war. I mean, who the hell are these people who changed their minds once the news started to turn sour? There are only two explanations: They're either unbelievable cowards, or they didn't think it through. In either case, if there were any justice, they would all be rounded up and dumped buck naked on the streets of Fallujah.

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