Urgent poll

Modestly describing itself as ‘one of America's leading online news services’, extreme right wing crackpot site NewsMax.com ‘is conducting an urgent national online poll’.

What, you might ask, could be urgent about an opinion poll? Obviously nobody could entertain the illusion that ‘decisionmakers’ are interested in what their ‘constituents’ think, or there would be no US troops in Iraq and abortion would be legal almost everywhere. The answer is that in this case they don’t want to record opinions at all. They want to create them, or at least reinforce them.

The page is headed, ‘Crisis Time: Should We Bomb Iran?’ Just dig these questions. They start off by asking

1) Do you believe U.S. efforts to contain Iran's nuclear weapons program are working?

And when did you start eating dog shit? Yeah, it’s that kind of question. It doesn’t matter how you answer, because whatever you say, you are agreeing that Iran has a nuclear weapons program and that the US is making efforts to ‘contain’ it. When they ask

2) Should the U.S. rely solely on the U.N. to stop Iran's nuclear weapons program?

it goes beyond the presupposition. Now there’s a sneaky little insinuation that the UN is not up to the job of stopping the mythical program, not that Newsmax readers would be in any doubt about that.

3) Do you believe Iran poses a greater threat than Saddam Hussein did before the Iraq War?

Now, we need to accept not only that Iran poses a threat, but that Saddam Hussein did, as well. And at this point, we come to the real point of the survey.

4) Do you agree with Joe Lieberman that the U.S. undertake military action against Iran if it does not stop their nuclear weapons program?

The only way I can read this carefully crafted question is that both ‘it’ and ‘their’ refer to Iran, as if the ‘survey designers’ couldn’t make up their ‘mind’ whether Iran was singular or plural. But it could be that ‘it’ refers to the UN and they didn’t bother to fix it when they inserted the Saddam question in between the UN question and this one? Jumpin’ Joe and Newsmax would never propose anything as gruesome as an attack. All they want is for the US to ‘undertake military action’. Wouldn’t harm a fly. And clearly Joe Lieberman is just the guy to take on the challenge of averting the terrible threat of Iran’s nuclear weapons program, possibly even more dangerous than Saddam’s ‘weapons of mass destruction-related program activities’.

5) Who should undertake military action against Iran first?

The US, or Israel?

NewsMax will provide the results of this poll to major media and every member of Congress. Additionally, NewsMax's results will be shared with every major radio talk show host in America.