Not surprisingly, the GOP's favorite pollster Scott Rasmussen showed up on The O'Reilly Factor last night (it's his base), where he continued to misrepresent one of his wildly misleading polls. But hey other than that, he's a great pollster.

As we keep detailing, Rasmussen's recent polling questions about whether investigations surrounding terror arrests in the U.S. should be handled by the military as a terror act, or civilian authorities as a criminal act makes no sense. Zero. None. Why? Because it's not an either/or choice. i.e. Acts of terror are criminal acts. Also, “civilian authorities” (read: FBI, DOJ) have been handling terrorist investigations for generations, and certainly handled them after 9/11.

In other words, civilian authorities launch terrorist investigations all the time, so why does Rasmussen pretend that only “military authorities” do that? (And if Rasmussen was trying to determine if American thought the Christmas Day bomber suspect should be tried in a military tribunal, than Rasmussen should have asked that. He did not.)

Behold Rasmussen on O'Reilly last night:

The number who want this guy treated by the military is higher than the number we found for the Fort Hood shootings a little while ago. Why? Well, there now have been two events. Overall, the American people are coming to believe that our system has shift shifted too far in the direction of protecting individual rights at the expense of national security. And the numbers are pretty dramatic. They'd been moving a lot in the last few months.

So based on a poorly worded and deeply misleading poll question, Rasmussen is able to divine all kinds of insights regarding how Americans now think our legal system leans too far towards “protecting individual rights at the expense of national security”?

No wonder he's the GOP's favorite pollster.

UPDATED: Loved this comment from Rasmussen on Fox News last night, as he defended his firm's work:

We had a great cycle for the presidential year.

Flashback: In very late October of 2008, on the eve of Obama's electoral rout, Rasmussen had Sen. John McCain closing the gap to just three points. One week later, McCain lost by more than twice that.

UPDATED: Rasmussen is out with yet more great-news-for-GOP poll results. How does he do it?