Poor Diane Feinstein! Poor Andrew Sullivan!

Left-wing bleeding heart democrats were looking to produce a big stink with the partisan Senate “Torture” report released last week. CIA officers were supposed to be found scrambling for pardons, and Dick Cheney was supposed to be consigned permanently to the dog house.

Instead, the CIA essentially shrugged and Dick Cheney went on television and called the report “crap.”

Today, the Washington Post looks at the latest polling from Pew on national attitudes toward enhanced interrogation and reports that waterboarding & Dick Cheney are a lot more popular than Barack Obama.

Muslim jihadis attacked a school in Peshawar today killing over a hundred people, mostly teachers and children. Normal Americans generally tend to think that waterboarding is actually too good for these kinds of people.

The Washington Post has some discouraging poll numbers.

[T]he legislative branch has been less popular than lice, brussels sprouts and Nickelback for some time now. What if we compared the favorability of 2016 presidential hopefuls and other political leaders with that of “Star Wars” characters?

Hillary Clinton currently has the highest net favorability of any 2016 White House contender. But to put her 19 percent favorable rating in context, she’s tied with Boba Fett, the bounty hunter who froze Harrison Ford in carbonite.

None of the 2016 hopefuls is polling higher than Darth Vader. You’ll recall that Vader chopped off his son’s arm and blew up an entire planet, but evidently in the eyes of the American public these are minor sins compared to Benghazi, Bridgegate and Gov. Rick Perry’s hipster glasses. These numbers suggest that if “Star Wars” were real and Darth Vader decided to enter the 2016 presidential race, he’d be the immediate front-runner.

Meanwhile President Obama is polling just two favorability points below Emperor Palpatine, Lord of the Sith. Make of that what you will.

Via Reason.

Next time you see a poll published in some newspaper indicating that a majority of the public believes in Global Warming, supports Gay Marriage, or thinks there ought to be a law against something or other, take a look at this one.

My parents believed back then that reading comic books was somehow bad for you.

DougRoss has the data.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

The Onion:

[A] New York Times/CBS News poll showed that though just 1 in 4 Americans believe that the United States has a responsibility to intervene in the Syrian conflict, more than 90 percent of the public is convinced that putting all 535 representatives of the United States Congress on the ground in Syria—including Senate pro tempore Patrick Leahy, House Speaker John Boehner, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, and, in fact, all current members of the House and Senate—is the best course of action at this time.

“I believe it is in the best interest of the United States, and the global community as a whole, to move forward with the deployment of all U.S. congressional leaders to Syria immediately,” respondent Carol Abare, 50, said in the nationwide telephone survey, echoing the thoughts of an estimated 9 in 10 Americans who said they “strongly support” any plan of action that involves putting the U.S. House and Senate on the ground in the war-torn Middle Eastern state. “With violence intensifying every day, now is absolutely the right moment—the perfect moment, really—for the United States to send our legislators to the region.”

“In fact, my preference would have been for Congress to be deployed months ago,” she added.

Citing overwhelming support from the international community—including that of the Arab League, Turkey, and France, as well as Great Britain, Iraq, Iran, Russia, Japan, Mexico, China, and Canada, all of whom are reported to be unilaterally in favor of sending the U.S. Congress to Syria—the majority of survey respondents said they believe the United States should refocus its entire approach to Syria’s civil war on the ground deployment of U.S. senators and representatives, regardless of whether the Assad regime used chemical weapons or not.

In fact, 91 percent of those surveyed agreed that the active use of sarin gas attacks by the Syrian government would, if anything, only increase poll respondents’ desire to send Congress to Syria.

Read the whole thing.

The Onion, of course, publishes satire, but I tend to suspect that a real life poll would not come out very differently.

Rudest state results. Surprise! surprise!

Business Insider asked Americans which states were the rudest, the drunkest, the hottest, had the weirdest accents, and so on.

Earlier this month, it was revealed that the management of this year’s Sex Week at Yale circulated a questionaire inquiring about Yale students’ sexual histories, whether they’d ever had sex for money, and what sort of activities had they participated in. Campus Reform blog

I personally smiled sardonically and shrugged when the Daily Mail swallowed this silliness whole and when one editorialist at NR online also climbed on board, worrying aloud about what all this pre-matriculation-at-college debauchery must say about the state of our civilization.

The Daily Mail is a British newspaper and, let’s face it, some of the guys who write for NR do not have personally an Ivy League background, so a little confusion about the meaning and validity of that particular poll was understandable. But, as the French flavorfully put it: “Il ne faut pas de enculer des mouches” [One does not sodomize flies]. I decided not even to dignify this nonsense by remarking on it.

I was clearly wrong. Some flies will keep demanding attention until they get it.

First of all, a few days ago, on Facebook, a prominent conservative intellectual I know (who did not go to Yale), was linking another instance of the one-out-of-ten-Yale-undergraduates-have-been-hookers news meme. So, I intervened and pointed out that in evaluating all this, one needed to reflect on in just what way the typical Yale undergraduate is likely to respond to blithering, intrusive, and basically bizarre questions about his-or-her sex life written up in ridiculous form by a professional “sexologist” who operates a suburban store selling dildos. I was only surprised that number of affirmative answers to the weirder questions was so low.

More recently, even Glenn Reynolds (who went to Yale Law, and ought to know better) was repeating this important meme.

March 21, 2013

HIGHER EDUCATION UPDATE: Nine Percent of Yale Students Surveyed Say They’ve Accepted Money for Sex. “Nine percent of Yale University students who participated in a recent survey on sexual behavior reported having been paid for sex at least once. Three percent said they had participated in bestiality, and more than half said they had ‘engaged in consensual pain’ during sex.”

When I read this sort of thing, I think back fondly to Ken Kesey appearing at Yale, during the Revolution, to announce to the nation his candidacy for the presidency (opposing Richard Nixon in 1972). Kesey was visibly inflamed with self-righteous political passion, egomania, and some sort of mood altering substances. He proudly delivered his diatribe, and began taking his bows while condescendingly accepting questions from the audience.

The Yale undergrad questioners began cruelly playing with Kesey like some cats playing with a mouse. They gravely expressed agreement with his nonsensical propositions, and deliberately and skillfully drew him farther and farther out along fanciful limbs of patently ridiculous claims pertaining to his qualifications for high office and elicited from him some extremely potentially embarassing proposals for national policies involving sex, drugs, and Rock & Roll. Then, the audience began mocking him. People asked unkind questions, like whether he might not be too stoned to campaign effectively. Kesey became infuriated, and he began exchanging invitiations to come up and fight him for catcalls from the floor. And that was how the audience at Ken Kesey’s presidential campaign announcement at Yale sank that campaign on its opening night.

Someday, boys and girls, I should tell you what we did to Norman Mailer, but that is another story. In any event, it is necessary to bear in mind, that most people who get into Yale are very, very bright, and that Yalies have a tendency to mock fools.

Washington Times:

An interesting little factoid has emerged from a new Fox News poll of U.S. voters: Personal sentiments are strong and defiant among many U.S. gun owners.

Question 46 in the wide-ranging survey of more than 1,000 registered voters asks if there is a gun in the household. Overall, 52 percent of the respondents said yes, someone in their home owned a gun. That number included 65 percent of Republicans, 59 percent of conservatives, 38 percent of Democrats and 41 percent of liberals.

But on to Question 47, addressed to those with a gun in their home: “If the government passed a law to take your guns, would you give up your guns or defy the law and keep your guns?”

The response: 65 percent reported they would “defy the law.” That incudes 70 percent of Republicans, 68 percent of conservatives, 52 percent of Democrats and 59 percent of liberals.

Mona Charen argues, I think correctly, that polls (filled with dubious and completely hidden assumptions) this year have succeeded in burying electoral reality, at least as far as the media reporting sources are concerned.

‘I don’t know,” a very wise and skeptical Washington political analyst confided to me on Sunday as I limned the Romney victory I foresee. “I’d like to believe it,” she said, “but I have to overlook a lot. If you’re right, then a whole lotta state polls have to be wrong.”

Very true. But I’ll climb all the way out onto a limb and assert that the state polls are wrong — or at least misleading.

Every four years we complain that the press covers the presidential contest as a horse race. This year sets some sort of new standard. This is the year when polls ate the campaign.

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And El Rushbo observes: Everthing, except the polls, points to a Romney landslide.

Personally, I think presidential election are usually easy to predict. You can tell when Americans generally are tired of the incumbent and inclined to give the other side a chance. You can tell when times are bad and people are going to vote out an administration they hold responsible.

By any rational criteria, the presidency of Barack Hussein Obama has been a disaster. Obama made countless grandiose promises. He told Americans that he would bring an end to racial animosity, that his administration would be unprecedentedly honest and open, that you could watch his proposals and initiatives being drafted on CSpan.

He broke every single one of those promises. He has governed autocratically, appointing more Czars and undertaking more innovative end runs around the law than any previous president in history. His signature achievement, Obamacare, was occultly drafted in closed backrooms, no CSpan, and it was then rammed through a Congress, unread, in the face the opposition of a much larger national majority than voted for Obama for the presidency.

His Justice Department has been flagrantly biased and corrupt, and his administration has been rife with scandals and cover ups.

He ran a bitter and divisive campaign in which he declined to offer any new meaningful promises and in which he had great difficulty taking credit for any positive achievement, unemployment, poverty rates, and gasoline prices all being higher than when he was first elected.

I can’t see any reason why today’s result should look different from 1980’s.