Americans should never take poll stories belched out from the liberal media at face value without checking the crosstabs first. Enter the Associated Press.
AP reporters Meg Kinnard and Linley Sanders put out a story twisting its own poll to whack President Trump’s celebration of the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army June 12 headlined, “Most US adults say Trump’s military parade is not a good use of money, a new AP-NORC poll finds.” But this wasn’t the main finding of the story.
In fact, Kinnard and Sanders admitted what the true finding of the poll was in the first paragraph. “As Washington prepares for a military parade this weekend to honor the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army, a new survey finds that U.S. adults are more likely to approve than disapprove of President Donald Trump’s decision to hold the festivities,” Kinnard and Sanders wrote.
The plurality of respondents to AP’s poll, 40 percent, supported Trump’s decision to hold the parade. Only 29 percent opposed it. But that’s not what they chose to sensationalize, because why would they choose to highlight a result approving of a Trump action?
Instead, the reporters zeroed in on the results of a sub-question that was less favorable to the president and blew it up to make it seem like his decision was running on hot coals with Americans:
But about 6 in 10 Americans also say that Saturday’s parade is ‘not a good use’ of government money, including the vast majority of people, 78%, who neither approve nor disapprove of the parade overall, according to the poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
First off: “Government money” sure is a funny way to describe Americans’ tax dollars. Secondly, it is reasonable to suggest that anybody with common sense would probably find better uses for taxpayer dollars (or, er, “government money”). But a bit of luxurious discretionary spending to honor the 250th birthday of the U.S. Army seems like a decent enough reason for a splurge, as the AP’s own poll reflected in its primary finding about the parade.
But in light of recent revelations about how much waste the government has been engaged in over the years, even AP’s sub-question to respondents about whether celebrating the U.S. Army was a good use of tax dollars looks utterly ridiculous in retrospect.
How about paying for hundreds of thousands of meals to al-Qaeda-affiliated fighters in Syria? Or how about the millions paid out by USAID to Guatemala for sex changes? Was that a “good use of money,” AP? How about the hundreds of millions in USAID funding that inadvertently went to cultivating the Taliban terrorist group’s lucrative poppy production for opium in Afghanistan? Or how about the $260 million that was doled out by USAID to a leftist nonprofit backed by George Soros pushing leftist government reforms across the globe? Or how about the fact that USAID was funding India’s first clinic for transgender people?
Comparatively speaking, it seems that celebrating the U.S. Army is in fact a better use of tax dollars when viewed next to the smorgasbord of leftist pet projects the government has been erroneously bankrolling. But who cares so long as AP is able to bend its own survey into a pretzel to get in a cheap shot at Trump, right?
