Harry Reid, Nevada's Democratic Senator, the grand poobah of the U.S. Senate, the man who is sending U.S. troops to their deaths daily through his unchallenged support of terrorists in Iraq, says he doesn't have to respond to Vice President Dick Cheney's criticisms because Cheney has a 9 percent approval rating.

Aside from the stifling hypocrisy of a man leading the U.S. Senate at the same time he has gone over to the side of the enemy in the War on Terror, and has a second job as a cheerleader for Islamo-fascists, Reid's claims that he doesn't have to answer for his actions are the best example yet of his disdain for the American system. Reid obviously has forgotten that he is a public servant, not a tyrant or dictator, and as such he is required to explain himself regardless of who is questioning his actions.

But I'd also like to get a look at the polling sample that says the VP has a 9 percent rating. Since I work in public relations I am familiar with polling and how it can help potential clients.

What I have found is that you can do an honest poll and get some real results that are helpful in directing your marketing and advertising efforts, or you can be a political hack and turn out poll results that were scripted beforehand and serve only to give you what you wanted in the first place. (In my firm we only do honest polling.)

The methodology for skewed polling is pretty straightforward. If you want to get an overwhelming result against the death penalty for instance, your best bet would be to do a sampling of death row inmates. If you can't get access to enough of them to give you a "fair" sample, then you get a mailing list from an active anti-death penalty group and use those people for your sample.

But polling has become far more sophisticated than that. Professional pollsters know that they can predict the results of their questioning based on how they frame the question, the potential answers provided, who they question, the population demographic they sample, and even when the people polled are questioned.

In my little corner of the universe, when I am in the company of people I consider friends and allies - which by the way includes Republicans, Democrats and Independents, veterans and non-veterans who nonetheless support the military - people generally like the VP. Far more people like him than dislike him, and they think he is doing a great job of speaking up and out for America.

Some people think Vice President Cheney is the only Washington figure speaking out for America and while they are royally frustrated with the Republican Party in general, their dissatisfaction doesn't extend to the VP.

So if I ran a poll today of let's say 100 acquaintances, and threw in maybe a dozen staunch Democrats who would say they hate the VP even if the VP was Mother Teresa, I could turn in an approval rating well in excess of 80 percent. I guess that would mean I can approach Reid and MAKE him answer why he is supporting the terrorists who are killing our troops.

This over-reliance on pre-engineered polls is dangerous, not to mention ridiculous. We send people to Congress to represent us, but we also give them the opportunity to let us know what is going on in places like Iraq where the average citizen has little to no access.

But instead, we have Congress continually using supposedly objective polling data to support political positions that actually have no resemblance to reality. The polls not only are skewed themselves, but the information given to the public by the media, on which the polls are then based, is also skewed.

So we end up with a constant cycle of decline, rather than an informed populace. This could not happen if the mainstream media wasn't just a propaganda arm of the Democratic Party, but unfortunately most Americans still get their news from people who have their own political agenda.

For instance, if a bomb blows up in Iraq, according to the Democrats, the communist media and especially Harry Reid & Associates, it means we have failed for that day, that week, and that month in that area, especially if bombs have blown up in that area before.

But what these bomb blasts really mean is that the terrorists have failed at intimidating the residents of that area, and we are still there, and they can't mount anything remotely resembling an offensive that has a chance of succeeding.
It means they are failing. They haven't defeated us, they haven't defeated that neighborhood, they haven't cowed anyone and they have to return repeatedly using the most heinous, cowardly means possible to try yet again to make their point.

This type of terrorism has failed time and again. It failed when used by communists, anarchists, Nazis, and now Islamo-fascists, yet we see Reid and the Congressional Democrats using their version of these events to push their 'Run and Hide' philosophy.

There are many things wrong with the way the war in Iraq has been handled, and virtually all of them come from political interference from people who have never been in a knock-down, drag-out fist fight, and have no idea how to proceed to victory in that arena.

We let enemies like Muqtada Al-Sadr go, when we had him in our grasp, which allowed him to turn his 'army' from a group of a few hundred to several thousands, all by use of terror tactics.

Today, the whole world knows that we are in the middle of an offensive against Al-Qaida in Iraq, as well as Sadr's army, and that we don't even have the troops who will be engaged in this 'surge' up to full strength. Why? Why do we know so much about what is happening today, and is intended for tomorrow and beyond?

One reason why the allied invasion of the German empire succeeded on D-Day, June 6, 1944, was because the Germans didn't know where our troops were going to land. It was brutal fighting, and we lost more than 4,000 killed in a few hours that fateful morning, but the landing in Normandy succeeded because some of the German Army's best troops and equipment were elsewhere.

We didn't alert the Japanese as to which island the Marines would be hitting next in the Pacific campaign during WWII, so why do we alert the terrorists not only that we are starting an offensive, but where it will happen, the timetable involved and even how many troops will be there?

Muqtada Al Sadr heard we were coming to his neighborhood even before this 'surge' got underway, and took off for Iran where he was giving sanctuary and the ability to maintain lines of communication with his troops. That ladies and gentlemen, is just plain stupid of us.

Lately, Gen. David Petraeus, commander of the multi-national force in Iraq, has been called to Washington to brief the Congress on the progress of this offensive, that still isn't up to full steam. Why?

If he is in charge of the fighting in Iraq, and our troops are in the middle of an offensive, his place is in Iraq, doing his job. If Congress needs yet another bogus round of hearings to micro-manage the military, then the uninformed among them should charter a plane, go to Iraq, and sit around the Green Zone cooling their heels until the General or his aides have a moment for them.

They he can brief them all at once, and get them the hell out of his hair and get back to fighting the war.

This appearance in Washington not only took him away from his post during combat, a court-martial offense for anyone below the rank of General, unless his name is John Kerry, it was counter-productive at worst and meaningless at best.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi refused to attend the General's briefings, and instead talked with him on the phone. But then we get a skewed version of what the general said.

Pelosi claims he agreed with her and Reid that the war in Iraq can't be won. That isn't what I heard the general say. I heard that he says a military victory is only one facet of ultimate victory there, the others being political, social and economic stability.

If Gen. Petraeus believes we can't score a military victory in Iraq then he should have been screaming it from the top of the Capitol building as well as in the halls of Congress. He should have been telling Congress to get us out of Iraq right this minute and the consequences be damned! That is his job and he should say so.

But he didn't say that, and it was disingenuous of Pelosi to imply otherwise.

But you watch. Reid and Pelosi, abetted by the media, will continue to claim that the war not only can't be won, it already has been lost. They will repeat the big lie, their accomplices in the media will continue to spread the big lie, and ultimately polls will show that some majority percentage of Americans believe the big lie.

But it still will be a big lie. And we can only hope that Dick Cheney will continue to expose it for what it is, and understand that out here in the real country called America, his approval rating is far higher than 9 percent, and we don't like Harry Reid at all.