Five myths and the Americans who believe them

I mistrust polls because they are usually fraudulent, either due to the specific questions asked, or to the size and relative proportional representativeness of the respondents. I hate polls because too many politicians use them as justifications for action or lack of action.

Pollsters disagree with my mistrust. Regarding their samples, they contend that 1,000 people provide a reliably good reflection of the sentiments of many more Americans; they cite polls of 1,000 and of 10,000 people on the exact same questions, in which the percentage of difference on any particular question between the smaller and larger samples is perhaps 1 or 2 percent at most.

The questions pollsters pose are another story, for their precise wording is the key to the pollster obtaining the desired answers. The spin of the posed question is why responses to Democratic and Republican pollsters’ queries on the same basic problem often differ so widely.

But polls do measure how deeply certain myths have entrenched themselves in the American public mind. In the wholesale adoption of these myths, what appears to be a bedrock form of American obtuseness — or, at least, an unwillingness to do the work of finding the facts and acknowledging their accuracy — is illuminated.

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Here are five myths now taken for fact by the majority of the polled public.

1. The hijackers of the planes on 9/11 were Iraqis, which is why the United States had to go to war against Iraq.

People continue to believe this despite conclusive evidence that none of the hijackers were Iraqis, and that most were Saudis. Evidence continues to mount showing that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were enemies, not allies.

2. Ronald Reagan’s U.S. military build-up caused the collapse of the Soviet Union by pushing it to match the build-up, which broke the Communist economy.

The evidence shows only a modest increase in the percentage of the USSR’s GDP spent to match the U.S. build-up, and that the Soviet economy did not collapse. Other factors contributed much more to the fall of the USSR: pressure for religious freedom, from John Paul II but also from Jewish, Muslim and Protestant groups, and pressure from Soviet citizens who wanted the material goods showcased in the broadcasts of CNN. And pressure from Mikhail Gorbachev’s astute leadership. Most scholars agree that George H. W. Bush had more to do with the dissolution of the Soviet Union than Reagan did.

3. Cowardly liberal congressmen lost the Vietnam War for the United States when the U.S. military had it won on the battlefield.

The facts: President Richard Nixon’s withdrawal of combat troops from Vietnam, which began almost as soon as he took office in 1969, and was nearly complete in 1971, crippled the military on the field and occurred well before Congress cut off any funding for troops, which did not begin until fiscal 1972. The peace treaty was signed in early 1973.

4. The Obama administration’s health-care reform bill includes “death panels� that will ration end-of-life care and force older Americans to, in effect, commit suicide.

Facts are that the current bills contain no death panels but simply reiterate earlier recommendations that all older Americans make out living wills and other documents that will enable their relatives to know their wishes should they become too ill to make those wishes known. Such provisions for late-in-life medical directives were codified regularly during the George W. Bush administration, and are in line with the recommendations of all competent medical and social authorities.

5. The free market is the solution to all of our problems, such as how to reform health care, how to climb out of the current recession and how to redress the fundamental inequalities of our capitalist system.

Time and again, the free market has been shown to be of limited value in solving the country’s problems. Government intervention has created such American institutions as Social Security, Medicare, grants to college students, protection of individual assets from bank failure (and stock trader company failure), industrial safety standards, protection for union members against retaliation by employers, pollution control standards, etc. The list is very long, and each item on it was hard-won, contentious at its instigation yet now accepted as a given (and a plus) in American society. President Obama and other elected officials have been amused by a common self-contradictory plaint heard in the town halls on health-care reform: “No government intervention in health care, and keep your hands off my Medicare.�

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Abraham Lincoln observed that you could fool some of the people all the time, and the deep-seatedness of these five myths shows that he was correct. The myths are embedded in Americans’ collective consciousness so deeply that facts will not purge them. That is sad. But what is unforgivable is that all of these myths were promulgated by Republicans who were looking to reap political advantage from them.

In their speeches and public pronouncements for years after 9/11, President Bush, Vice President Cheney and other Republican officials repeatedly linked 9/11 and Iraq, and did almost nothing to dispel the myth that the hijackers were Iraqis.

Republicans looking to capitalize on the notion that Reagan killed the Soviet Union, including the neocons, in their first Project for a New Century manifesto in the 1990s, kept burnishing that myth when it had already been disproved by facts.

Republicans bent on blaming Democrats for a lost war repeated, and continue to repeat today, the false canard that Congressional liberals lost Vietnam. Republicans also continue to try to push the nation toward market-based solutions to huge economic and social problems when the problems clearly need some sort of government intervention in order to be solved at all. And only Republicans are harping on the “death panels� idea today.

Also common to these pernicious myths is their appeal to fear. The promulgators believe that it is easier to push people around if they are scared — and the evidence of the depth of Americans’ clinging to these myths shows that cynicism is justified.

Salisbury resident Tom Shachtman has written more than two dozen books and many television documentaries.