The GOP Descent Into Insanity: 64% of Republicans Are Birthers

How does one begin to describe the mass insanity that has taken over the Republican Party?  My Republican ancestors would be spinning in their graves if they could see the batshitery that now qualifies as mainstream GOP thought.  Ditto for William F. Buckley, Jr., who worked to bring intellect and reason to conservationism.  Now, to be a Republican one literally must have had a lobotomy or be clinically insane.  How else to explain the findings of a new Fairleigh Dickinson University survey of register voters that found that 64% of Republicans are so-called "birthers" who continue to believe that Barack Obama wasn't born in the United States.  Apparently, Hawaii doesn't qualify as a part of the nation in the minds of those who inhabit the fetid swamp that is today's GOP.  A piece in Salon looks at the off the charts delusion of Republicans.  Here are highlights:

A whopping 64 percent of Republicans think it’s “probably true” that President Obama is hiding important information about his background and early life, including his possible birthplace, according to a new nationwide survey of registered voters from Fairleigh Dickinson University’s PublicMind project examining Americans’ belief in political conspiracy theories.

The report goes on to state that purported levels of knowledge generally reduces susceptibility to belief in birtherism and conspiracy theories and birtherism in general - except among Republicans where claimed knowledge of current events has an opposite effect:

In general, higher levels of actual knowledge about politics tends to reduce belief inconspiracy theories. In the poll, respondents were asked a series of four questions about current events, and respondents who were able to answer more questions correctly were less likely to endorse the conspiracy theories. Fifteen percent of people who got none of the questions right thought that three or four of the conspiracies were likely, compared to three percent of those who answered three or four correctly. Education also tended to reduce belief in the conspiracy theories.

However, the relationship between current events knowledge and belief in conspiracy theories is conditional on partisanship. Among Democrats, each question answered correctly reduces the likelihood of endorsing at least one of the conspiracy theories by seven points.Among independents, each additional question reduces it by two points. For Republicans,though, each additional question answered correctly tends to increase belief in at least one of the theories by two points.

Given that evangelical Christians - the mainstay of today's GOP - have lower levels of education and higher levels of belief that the Bible is literally true in every respect, perhaps the staggering levels of birtherism correlate simply correlate to the increasing ignorance of the GOP base.  Whatever the cause, it is sad that a political part that once valued intelligence, education, logic and reason has been reduced to a group of ignorance embracing Neanderthals.