Do you believe in Iraqi “WMD”? Did Saddam Hussein’s government have weapons of mass destruction in 2003?

Half of America apparently still thinks so, a new poll finds, and experts see a raft of reasons why: a drumbeat of voices from talk radio to die-hard bloggers to the Oval Office, a surprise headline here or there, a rallying around a partisan flag, and a growing need for people, in their own minds, to justify the war in Iraq.

People tend to become “independent of reality” in these circumstances, says opinion analyst Steven Kull. ~AP

How is it that this number has actually gone up in the last year?  Did Rick Santorum’s joke of a press conference actually convince that many people?  Are that many people that easily fooled by a transparent, desperate lie?  Apparently, yes.  They are, of course, almost all loyal Republicans believing what the administration’s lackeys on radio, TV and the blogs tell them to believe:

“For some it almost becomes independent of reality and becomes very partisan.” The WMD believers are heavily Republican, polls show.  

And I am not alone in my relative bewilderment:

“I’m flabbergasted,” said Michael Massing, a media critic whose writings dissected the largely unquestioning U.S. news reporting on the Bush administration’s shaky WMD claims in 2002-03.

“This finding just has to cause despair among those of us who hope for an informed public able to draw reasonable conclusions based on evidence,” Massing said.

You might also cite the public’s incompetence as another reason “why democracy is dangerous and generally to be avoided.”  I don’t just say this out of frustration with the appalling ignorance of the public and impressive mendacity of the Republican lackey media.  Those things are not new.  In fact, most of the other half who believe that WMDs were never in Iraq only believe this because this is what their political leaders now tell them–they have not reached this conclusion on their own and would never have dared deny the reality that “everyone” supposedly accepted before the invasion.  No, this is not just frustration with the willfully blind and the ignorant, but a more important point. 

Democracy, if it is to function at all well, has to have two things: 1) a well-informed public capable of critical thinking and 2) a people raised up in a spirit of independence from any faction or master that might try to manipulate and mislead them for private purposes.  Without the former, the people are quickly given over to the rule of a tyranny; without the latter, they surrender willingly to oligarchs and demagogues.  In this country, we have an ill-informed public known for its astonishing credulity (and not just about Iraq or WMDs!) and an apparent inability to analyse evidence, and a people raised up in a spirit of servility to party and president (or at least servility to the president when he is from “your” party).  Under these circumstances, democracy is not only dysfunctional, but becomes a genuine threat to the common good and the welfare of the commonwealth.  A more properly republican government was our original type of regime after independence, and would certainly serve the country better.