Collective Conscious

Just yes­ter­day (although today I can’t recall the source), a blog asked “how long will it take until con­ser­v­a­tives call for Abdul­mut­ta­lab to be tor­tured?” Today, we have the answer: about 36 hours. Head­lin­ing over at Hot Air:

Who’s for water­board­ing Abdul­mut­ta­lab – before it’s too late? – UPDATE: Poll added

[Michael] Gold­farb and his cor­re­spon­dent sug­gest that 65% or so of Amer­i­cans would vote for waterboarding.

I’ll add that I believe, if a cam­paign of attacks actu­ally occurs, that per­cent­age would quickly hit the 80% level or higher, even and espe­cially if you worded the ques­tion to include tech­niques to the “right” of waterboarding.

That 65% num­ber is lit­er­ally pulled from a  ran­dom e-​​mail. Michael Gold­farb him­self comments:

A friend emails a ques­tion Scott Ras­mussen might want to poll.

So, let’s check the actual poll results for some ver­i­fi­ca­tion of these claims (WaPo/​ABC, Jan­u­ary 2009, empha­sis in original):

By a wide mar­gin –  58–40% — Amer­i­cans say that tor­ture should never be used, no mat­ter the cir­cum­stances. Let’s repeat that:  “no mat­ter the circumstance.”  That mar­gin is enor­mous among Democ­rats (71–28%) and sub­stan­tial among inde­pen­dents (56–43%).  As usual these days, Republicans hold the minor­ity view, but even among them there is sub­stan­tial cat­e­gor­i­cal oppo­si­tion to tor­ture (42–55%).

And from the most right-​​leaning poll (Pew, April 2009, empha­sis mine):

The sur­vey by the Pew Research Cen­ter found that 15 per­cent of respon­dents said tor­ture can often be jus­ti­fied while 34 per­cent say it is some­times jus­ti­fied, for a total of 49 per­cent. Another 22 per­cent said tor­ture is rarely jus­ti­fi­able and 25 per­cent said it should never be used.

Which leads me to a recur­ring ques­tion: is research really too much to ask of conservatives?