And There You Have It

According to a GlobeScan BBC poll the world wants Obama to be president:

 “US Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama may be struggling to nudge ahead of his Republican rival in polls at home, but people across the world want him in the White House, a BBC poll said.

 All 22 countries covered in the poll would prefer to see Senator Obama elected US president ahead of Republican John McCain.

 In 17 of the 22 nations, people expect relations between the US and the rest of the world to improve if Senator Obama wins.

 More than 22,000 people were questioned by pollster GlobeScan in countries ranging from Australia to India and across Africa, Europe and South America.

 The margin in favour of Senator Obama ranged from 9 per cent in India to 82 per cent in Kenya, while an average of 49 per cent across the 22 countries preferred Senator Obama compared with 12 per cent preferring Senator McCain. Some four in 10 did not take a view.”

 And in related news:

 “Seven years after the Sept. 11 attacks, there is no consensus outside the United States that Islamist militants from al Qaeda were responsible, according to an international poll published Wednesday.

 The survey of 16,063 people in 17 nations found majorities in only nine countries believe al Qaeda was behind the attacks on New York and Washington that killed about 3,000 people in 2001.

 U.S. officials squarely blame al Qaeda, whose leader Osama bin Laden has boasted of organizing the suicide attacks by his followers using hijacked commercial airliners.

 On average, 46 percent of those surveyed said al Qaeda was responsible, 15 percent said the U.S. government, 7 percent said Israel and 7 percent said some other perpetrator. One in four people said they did not know who was behind the attacks.”

 I simply can not come up with a better reason to stop paying attention to what the rest of the world thinks. This stuff just writes itself.

What a bunch of maroons.

Liars, Damned Liars And Pollsters

Karl Rove, in a Wall Street Journal article this morning, has this to say about the recent spate of highly inaccurate primary polls:

"The dirty secret is it is hard to accurately poll a primary. The unpredictability of who will turn out and what the mix of voters will be makes polling a primary election like reading chicken entrails -- ugly, smelly and not very enlightening. Our media culture endows polls -- especially exit polls -- with scientific precision they simply don't have."

I agree; and then the media quickly decides who should and should not be in the race based on those very polls. It certainly seems like wish fulfillment of the Fourth Estate kind.