After fighting with a right wing defendant on
Bill Maher’s forum, who insisted only
13% of Americans were blaming George Bush for the bad response last week in the
Gulf Coast, I dissected his data and produced an enormous lie being reported by
the right wing spin machine NewsMax.

First
NewsMax reported this on Wednesday in an article titled “New Poll: Americans
Not Blaming Bush for Katrina Problems”

Only 13 percent of those polled believe President Bush is “most
responsible” for the problems in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, a
new poll discloses.

And 35 percent said Bush has done a “great” or “good” job responding
to the hurricane and flooding, according to the CNN/USA Today/Gallup
poll.

Ok, sounds truthful enough until you read the actual
CNN article that
reveals the poll numbers. I will quote only the pertinent paragraph here.

Opinions varied widely, however, on the response of federal, state and
local officials regarding Katrina. Forty-two percent of respondents
characterized President Bush’s response to the disaster as “bad” or
“terrible,” while 35 percent said it was “good” or “great.”

There we see the real numbers. NewsMax, in their article, eliminated the
apparent 29% of respondents that thought Bush’s response was bad, but felt
compelled to combined the two positive responses in order to spin their story.
Ironically the NewsMax story goes onto reveal the rest of the poll, which deals
mostly with the rebuilding of New Orleans, but they never mention that there was
a fourth option in the poll that characterized Bush’s response as “bad”, the
category that apparently got the most votes.

Just another example of how the right is spinning the facts to try and defend
the President’s failures next week. The sad part is they can’t even spin it that
good anymore.