Here’s a hint: Name a river in Egypt.

When they find an issue they know they can’t win on, they just don’t play. Kinda like a pissed off third grader at recess. BTW - Right On Reid

I think this is indicative but not as strong as result as claimed here. Note that the respondents weren’t asked whether the threat of terrorism concerns them. In contrast, they could only respond with one item on the list.

I’m not sure I would have answered “terrorism” myself for several reasons.

• We aren’t fighting “terrorism”, but Caliphascism. You can’t fight means, only people and ideologies.
• There’s no doubt in my mind that should we actually commit to a real fight, we would win. The war is ours to lose, not theirs to win.
• I’m actually more concerned with some other long term structural problems in the Republic which don’t seem as winnable to me.

While some signs are worrying for the war, overall support seems high and as long as that’s true, we will win.

This boggles my mind as well. I understand partisan politics… but this is a life-or-death issue. Shouldn’t we all be on the same side? (hint to Democrats, we’re on the side of life)

Its hard to imagine, but prior to the wave of “win the WhiteHouse at any cost” politics I actually called myself a Dem.

Here’s a recent exchange I caught on Bill Maher’s new show which sums it all up.

MOORE: Yes, I think we are. I think – I think that this whole terrorism high alert, red alert, orange alert stuff is all just to get us whipped up into giving them whatever they want. It’s a cover for their agenda, for their right-wing agenda. [applause]

And it’s – the – I think these words need to be said somewhere on national TV, and they are: there is no terrorist threat. There is no terrorist threat.

No terrorist threat, you say? Is 9/11 a figment of our collective imaginations? What about the suicide missions in Israel or Iraq… or in Russia, Saudi Arabia and Bali? I dare Michael to repeat those words, not behind the safe barrier of coax cable and satellite dishes, but right up in the face of a bereaved family. I double-dog dare you.

For Democrats, 9/11 was our fault and we deserved to get what we got because we are arrogant oppressors of the world. How can you be concerned about terrorism when you either accept that we’re the guilty party or actually condone it?

I’d like to see the results from that group to this question, “Should the U.S. offer to unconditionally surrender to islamists as a means of creating lasting peace?” What do you think the numbers would be?

I have a suspicion that the same poll administered to Republican activists would certainly reveal some different results, but not surprisingly different results if the name Clinton (or Gore) were inserted into the questions as a hypothetical. There is obviously some partisanship at work here; but there is also the very real possibility that the majority of Americans (party affiliatin aside) have simply lost interest in the war on terrorism. I would be very curious to see a similar poll conducted of Republicans.

I must admit that after reading the story you linked to I, had the same reaction as you. But Then I got to thinking. The results of that poll don’t appear to square very well with other polls conducted during and immediately after the war that showed that nearly 3/4ths of those polled supported the President in his taking the fight to Iraq. It seems to me that its not that those who identify themselves with the Democratic party don’t care about fighting terrorism and the rogue states who sponsor it, just that its not as high on the list as domestic issues. It seems to me that the results from the Iowa poll indicating 1 percent worry mostly about terrorism is about what would be expected. I don’t think it means that only 1 in a hundred care, just 1 in a hundred who think of it as the most threatening issue facing us today. Admittedly this is a revealing poll, but we should be cautious in interpreting the results and labeling Democrats as unwise or unpatriotic because they don’t worry about terrorism.

To Jimmy: I’d like to see a Republican version of this poll too. I bet you’d get 70 to 80 percent saying terrorism is numero uno. Maybe more.

To Brent: Who said anything about patriotism? I did that schtick a week ago. This post was just focusing on why activist Dems, and by extension Dems generally, seem to rate terrorism so low in the face of all that’s going on. I added in the bit about Dean to illustrate that it’s not just the result of one poll in a few states that should guide us. Dean’s rise is tracable to the amount of anti-war stuff he’s willing to say—the more he says and the louder he says it, the better his numbers get among the Dems. The Dems’ entire focus before the 2002 elections was to get the war off the agenda and return to domestic programs asap, because they had little to contribute to the war. And though I didn’t mention this (I spent all of about a minute on that post), I see this kind of thing personally. I spend lots of time with two distinct groups, one of which is very right-leaning and one of which is very left-leaning. The right-leaners know people who are fighting in the war, they support the war and tend to see it as the top issue facing the country today. They tend to see domestic issues as important, but irrelevant if we can’t fend off people who want to kill us all. Most of them support Bush because of his war leadership, but aren’t thrilled with his weaknesses on domestic issues—spending is a big one, as is his capitulation to the Senator from Chappaquiddick on education. But based on the war’s progress and their distrust of the Dems on that issue and several social issues, they’ll turn out for Bush en masse next year. Bank on it.

The left-leaners constantly criticize the war, call Bush bad names, call anyone who supports the war bad names, and frequently mutter about dark conspiracy theories and Reichstag burnings and the like. No kidding. They tend to see the war as something Bush is using to distract everyone from some awful thing going on domestically, though what that is they can never quite pin down (which in turn confirms their distraction theory for them). They alternate between calling Bush a moron or an evil genius, never seeing the contradiction at all. These are very smart people otherwise, honest to goodness Mensa types with lots of degrees from very fancy schools, but when it comes to Bush and the war, sometimes I’d swear some of them have been lobotomized. Patriotic or not, they very obviously don’t see terrorism as the big issue, or even as one of many big issues, and tend to see Bush as either just slightly better than Saddam Hussein or possibly worse. No kidding.