Multiple choice

Readers of the Age will be aware that the paper recently ran a poll on attitudes to the Howard government at its 10-year mark. Even with the hopelessly skewed methodology employed (including idiotic rorschach-blot questions about how 'mean' Australia has become), they still came up with some good results for Howard, such as strong approval for his handling of terrorism. This must be biting, because today they ran an editorial cartoon from Ron Tandberg (who looks almost sensible next to Michael Leunig but, hey, who doesn't?) which takes the rather extraordinary step of bagging the respondents to the poll for giving inconsistent, and insufficiently Howard-bashing, answers.

Now there's a first: newspaper asks your opinion on something, then runs cartoon bagging you for not giving the right answer. Actually, Ron is right to point to the inconsistency of some of the responses, but he fails to draw the correct conclusion, i.e., that the methodology of the poll was loaded and confused. I thought this myself when seeing the result that many of the respondents who approved of Howard's handling of terrorism simultaneously thought going to war in Iraq was 'wrong'.