Someone set us up the...

According to this recent CNN Poll 71% of Americans think Iran already has nuclear weapons.

My immediate thought was "oh boy, I guess we're in for another war". Although then I had to remember that all the justification for preemptive war is to *stop* people from getting nuclear weapons, so if they already have them... The whole thing is just confounding.

I wanted to blame this on the media somehow, or our culture of sound bite politics, but I'm honestly baffled by who would benefit from spreading this misunderstanding.

I understand that spreading the meme that "Iran is dangerous and might obtain The Bomb if we don't act fast" is useful to some people's agendas, but that they've already gotten there... Bald manipulation of the public I understand, but this result, almost seems like showing off.

"Fooling the public into supporting a war based on false pretenses was way too easy"
"Agreed. This time, let's first make them believe the exact opposite of the reason we'll give to goto war, and then try to get them to support it!"
"You're on!"

In my lifetime, I've gone through the following political realizations:

• 1st through 8th grade I was blindly rooting for the political team my parents did
• 9th grade I thought communism was the awesomest
• 10th grade through college I grew to understand and the arguments and beliefs that many Republicans held, and why they held them. I still disagreed with many of their conclusions, but understood how and why they arrived at them.
• In 2002 I began wondering why the Republican president was acting like a lunatic instead of a conservative.
• By 2004 I no longer understood the logic behind voters supporting the so called "Republicans", but I at least understood the emotions behind it, and I definitely understood the rather base motivations of the politicians themselves.
• By the end of 2009 I wondered what, exactly supporting Democrats was, in theory, supposed to accomplish. Although the fact that things stopped getting more bat-shit crazy was nice.
• And now, here we are, amongst a populace seemingly criminally ill-informed about a country in between two other countries we're occupying.

I now imagine 71% of Americans as one of those wax-Neanderthal at the science museum. Me looking up at them from behind the velvet divider, wondering how much alike we are, how they managed to survive on a day to day basis. Except of course the tables are reversed, and homo-doesn't-believe-stupid-shit-for-no-reason is apparently the one on the road to extinction.