Wednesday, March 24, 2010

New Harris Poll Suggests GOP Is Becoming Party of Ignorant Idiots

I come from a family that was principally Republican going back for decades, certainly back into the late 1960's. Nixon caused a break in that trend, but then things gravitated back to the old pattern. Indeed, I recall my dad at political events back when Nelson Rockefeller was Governor of New York. Later I served on the Virginia Beach City Committee for the GOP before the Christianists hijacked the Party. At the time, it seemed that it was a respectable political party and that it for the most part catered to educated and rational people. It also was a party that understood the concept of separation of church and state and that the state and federal constitutions among other things protected minorities from mob majority rule. Not any more. Watching Rachel Maddow last night, she cited some scary data from a new Harris poll that confirms that nowadays to be a Republican one needs to be a self-centered, irrational Kool-Aid drinker. Here is some of the findings:
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67 percent of Republicans (and 40 percent of Americans overall) believe that Obama is a socialist.
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57 percent of Republicans (32 percent overall) believe that Obama is a Muslim
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45 percent of Republicans (25 percent overall) agree with the Birthers in their belief that Obama was "not born in the United States and so is not eligible to be president"
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38 percent of Republicans (20 percent overall) say that Obama is "doing many of the things that Hitler did"
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24 percent of Republicans (14 percent overall) say that Obama "may be the Antichrist."
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I can only wonder in what alternate universe these folks live in. Objective facts mean nothing to them. But then again, the GOP has been taken over by far right Christians who believe the earth is only about 6000 years old and that mankind shared the earth with dinosaurs for a period of time. One can only wonder what educated people in foreign countries must think of the lunacy of this large of a portion of the USA's population. Obviously, China and other nations that long to be the next principal powers must see these results as good news. The USA is slowly self-destructing from within and it's not the liberals causing the nation's decline.

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