We'd like our opinion polls a la carte

Amid the recycled spin points on Opinionjournal today, there's an easy catch of a very basic inconsistency. They have to deal with the damage being done to Dubya by the CIA NOC list affair, and there's that messy opinion poll in the Washington Post:

81% of those polled think this is a "serious" matter.
72% think it is "likely" that someone in the White House "leaked this classified information"
69% favor the appointment of a special counsel

How to spin around this one? It's just a poll, and people who respond to polls are often uninformed:

Only 68% of those polled--less than all the percentages cited above--had heard or read anything about the situation, and one suspects comparatively few of those are following the story closely enough to have a well-informed opinion.

DUDES! There's this thing called Google, where we can do a specific search of your site to see your past comments on the validity of polls, and knowing that you love that theory that Saddam was involved in 9/11, what do we find?

The [Washington] Post reports that 80% of Republicans, 67% of independents and 62% of Democrats answered "somewhat" or "very" likely [that Saddam was involved in 9-11]. And the paper doesn't think much of this view, calling it an "apparently groundless belief" and interviewing an assortment of "experts" who, while acknowledging that President Bush has never actually asserted such a link, he has used devious mind-control techniques to fool Americans into believing it exists.

In truth, however, "somewhat likely" is the correct answer to the Post's question.

Now of course there are uninformed people in the world, for example, people who think that Donovan McNabb is the first black quarterback in the NFL, foisted there by a liberal media conspiracy as their guinea pig for showing that blacks can play that position. In the Opinionjournal world, such people are in the first poll, but mysteriously absent from the second. With such vagaries of finding out what people think, it's a wonder we trust elections at all!