You have to be utterly ignorant of history, in a state of denial, dumb as grits or

[OnyxCollie]

135. Yet in 2002, liberals were more supportive of liberty-restricting laws like the USA PATRIOT Act.

http://sync.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=103x582516#582750

Methodology

The data for this study was obtained through the Inter-university Consortium for Political
and Social Research. The data is a Washington Post September 11th Poll, conducted September
3-6, 2002. The poll was conducted through telephone surveys, whereby the households called
were chosen by random-digit dialing and the respondent chosen was an adult who last had a
birthday and was present at the time. The data set includes 1,003 cases and 81 variables.
This data was chosen for the respondent’s views on whether the September 11 attacks had
changed their lives, if people could be trusted, if they were concerned for their safety, if they
supported laws to aid the F.B.I. in the investigation of terrorism, whether they would sacrifice
freedoms to aid in the investigation of terrorism, if they approved of their congressional
representative, if they intended to re-elect their congressional representative, and which party
they would be voting for in the 2002 congressional election. Supporting laws, sacrificing
freedom, approval and re-election of congressional representatives, and choice of political party
for congressional representative vote will serve as the dependent variables. Whether 9/11
changed their lives, if the change affected their day-to-day lives or if it changed the way they
thought about things, and trust in people will serve as the independent variables. Concern over
personally being the victim of a terrorist attack will serve as the control variable.

“There Must Be a Reason”: Osama, Saddam, and Inferred Justification
http://sociology.buffalo.edu/documents/hoffmansocinquiryarticle_000.pdf

One of the most curious aspects of the 2004 presidential election was the strength
and resilience of the belief among many Americans that Saddam Hussein was linked to
the terrorist attacks of September 11. Scholars have suggested that this belief was the
result of a campaign of false information and innuendo from the Bush administration.
We call this the information environment explanation. Using a technique of “challenge
interviews” on a sample of voters who reported believing in a link between Saddam and
9/11, we propose instead a social psychological explanation for the belief in this link.
We identify a number of social psychological mechanisms voters use to maintain false
beliefs in the face of disconfirming information, and we show that for a subset of voters
the main reason to believe in the link was that it made sense of the administration’s decision
to go to war against Iraq. We call this inferred justification: for these voters, the fact of the
war led to a search for a justification for it, which led them to infer the existence of ties
between Iraq and 9/11.

~snip~

In this article we present data that contest this explanation, and we develop
a social psychological explanation for the belief in the link between Saddam
and Al Qaeda. We argue that the primary causal agent for misperception is not
the presence or absence of correct information but a respondent’s willingness to
believe particular kinds of information. Our explanation draws on a psychological
model of information processing that scholars have labeled motivated reasoning.
This model envisions respondents as processing and responding to information
defensively, accepting and seeking out confirming information, while ignoring,
discrediting the source of, or arguing against the substance of contrary information
(DiMaggio 1997; Kunda 1990; Lodge and Tabor 2000). Motivated reasoning is
a descendant of the social psychological theory of cognitive dissonance (Festinger
and Carlsmith 1959; Kunda 1990), which posits an unconscious impulse to
relieve cognitive tension when a respondent is presented with information that
contradicts preexisting beliefs or preferences. Recent literature on motivated
reasoning builds on cognitive dissonance theory to explain how citizens relieve
cognitive dissonance: they avoid inconsistency, ignore challenging information
altogether, discredit the information source, or argue substantively against the
challenge (Jobe, Tourangeau, and Smith 1993; Lodge and Taber 2000; Westen
et al. 2006). The process of substantive counterarguing is especially consequential,
as the cognitive exercise of generating counterarguments often has the ironic
effect of solidifying and strengthening the original opinion leading to entrenched,
polarized attitudes (Kunda 1990; Lodge and Taber 2000; Sunstein 2000; Lodge and
Taber 2000). This confirmation bias means that people value evidence that confirms
their previously held beliefs more highly than evidence that contradicts them,
regardless of the source (DiMaggio 1997; Nickerson 1998, Wason 1968).

~snip~

We chose to focus on Republican partisans because of the well-documented
partisan difference in the perception of the validity of this link. We assumed
that Democratic partisans would not have a strong desire to defend the Bush
administration on this issue, thus severely reducing the variation we would
capture in responses. Our choice of subjects means that we are investigating how
partisanship produces and reinforces political (mis)information. Our choice of
subjects should not be taken to imply that the processes we are examining here
are particular to conservatives: we expect that, had we conducted this study in
the late 1990s, we would have found a high degree of motivated reasoning
regarding the behavior of President Clinton during the Lewinsky scandal.
Previous research on motivated reasoning has found it among respondents of all
classes, ages, races, genders, and affiliations (see Lodge and Tabor 2000).