Probably a misreading of the question lead to these responses. Bush certainly did not have any specific knowledge about the coming 9/11 attack but the threat of Bin Laden was common knowledge.

http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/04/10/august6.memo/

We have not been able to corroborate some of the more sensational threat reporting, such as that from a ---- service in 1998 saying that Bin Laden wanted to hijack a U.S. aircraft to gain the release of "Blind Sheikh" Omar Abdel Rahman and other U.S.-held extremists.

Nevertheless, FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.

So, in only the most broad and general sense did Bush know anything about the coming attacks.

Posted by e. nonee moose at May 6, 2007 04:40 PM

Ugh... For some reason mu.nu handles italics differently from other blogs. The paragraph beginning "Nevertheless" should also be in italics as well, indicating a quote. I guess we Democrats suck at using HTML tags as well.

Posted by e. nonee moose at May 6, 2007 04:42 PM

I suspect moose has a strong point here, though he may underestimate the number of actual deranged people believing the president was somehow in on the deal. Depending on how the question is asked, I have seen numbers from 20% to 50% of Democrats claiming "Bush knew in advance." Some likely believe he knew but ignored or disregarded, others would suspect that Bush-connected people knew and he didn't contain them, and some subset of the larger total believes the full-out conspiracy of neocons bringing down the WTC.

This particular poll does seem to be well-asked, however. That many would misunderstand it in the direction moose suggests is undermined by the 7-1 margin of Republicans who rejected the idea. The addition of "the CIA knew" number of 29% - as if the CIA would be in cahoots with Bush! - is similar to the Bush number. I would conclude from this that there are quite a few Democrats who seriously believe an insane conspiracy theory. Perhaps not quite as high as the poll numbers, but up close to that.

Posted by Assistant Village Idiot at May 6, 2007 05:16 PM

That many would misunderstand it in the direction moose suggests is undermined by the 7-1 margin of Republicans who rejected the idea.

They didn't report the actual numbers for the Republicans and that kind of bothered me, because it's hard to say what a 7-1 margin means. It could mean that as many as 12.5% of Republicans also believe Bush knew about the attacks ahead of time and that would be an astoundingly high number coming from Republicans. If you had access to the "crosstabs" then it would be easier to judge the validity of the poll, but that's for "Premium Members" only.

Posted by e. nonee moose at May 7, 2007 06:15 AM

Well that undermines your original point, moose. If a double-digit number of Republicans think Bush knew beforehand, and you interpret that in it's strong form of his "knowing" as in "being involved in," then you can't take the mild interpretation for the Democrats who said the same.

I think your first guess was correct: 10% of the people answering didn't understand what the question meant.

Posted by Assistant Village Idiot at May 7, 2007 07:15 PM