Breathtakingly bad Fox poll (is there another kind?)

Head over to headsup: the blog where fev takes apart a breath-takingly bad FOX News poll:

The reason you always want to introduce the concept described in graf 4 as "margin of sampling error," rather than "margin of error," is that "sampling" is only one of the many kinds of error that bedevil research. It's an annoying cliche to say "there are no stupid questions," because in fact there are rather a lot of them. Stupid questions are a leading source of error too, as in these samples from other recent Fox/Opinion Dynamics surveys:

Which of the following two descriptions of the way things are today do you agree with more?...The nation's economy is not improving, Osama bin Laden has not been captured and the United States is in an unnecessary war with Iraq. The nation's economy is strong, there have been no new terrorist attacks in the United States and the world is safer with Saddam Hussein out of power and an elected government in Iraq. (May 2006)
Each of the options has three components. Which one is the poor respondent responding to? What other ways are there of describing "the way things are today"?

... So "question error" broadly is the set of stuff that asks: Given that N% (+/- 3.1) of subjects said "yes" or "1" or "2," what does "yes" or "1" or "2" really mean? Which, with all due respect, is how rational grownups need to approach Fox's Question 40:

Do you personally think the world would be better off if the United States loses the war in Iraq?

OK, how would you have responded? "Gee, FOX News, I thought we'd already won that war!" Or: "You 'win' a war when you plant your flag in the smoking ruins of the enemy capital. Do you mean 'would the world be better off if the United States pulled up its flag and left Baghdad,' or do you mean 'would the world be better off if Iraq planted its flag in Washington'? Because those are two radically unrelated questions that have somewhere between 'lots' and 'nothing' to do with the political choices I might decide on?"