Putting public ignorance in context

May 27, 2008

I genuinely believed, foolishly, that one of the unintended side benefits of the media’s fascination with Jeremiah Wright is that no one, anywhere, could still possibly believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim. After all, everyone in the country got to see a whole lot of Obama’s Christian pastor and his Christian church. Sure, there are some uninformed people out there, and some willfully ignorant people who simply choose not to accept reality, but generally speaking, it’s hard to imagine more than a handful of voters buying this foolishness.

And yet, the polls have been discouraging. The most recent Newsweek poll found that 11% of the public still thinks Obama is a Muslim. An NYT/CBS poll put the number at 7%. The Pew Forum found 10%.

As disappointing as this is, however, Ben Smith provided some interesting context to public confusion.

One relevant piece of context: Large minorities of Americans consistently say they hold wildly out-of-the-mainstream views, often specifically discredited beliefs. In some cases, those views should make them pretty profoundly alienated from one party or the other.

For instance:

22 percent believe President Bush knew about the 9/11 attacks in advance.

30 percent believe Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.

23 percent believe they’ve been in the presence of a ghost.

18 percent believe the sun revolves around the Earth.

In other words, if about one-in-10 voters buy into the nonsense about Obama, it’s still a reasonably low number, compared to some other widely-held misconceptions.

I’m just not sure, from a political perspective, whether this is reassuring or not.

Ben looked at the numbers and concluded, “Obama may well be elected president with a substantial minority of the citizens despising him and convinced that his beliefs are irreconcilably foreign to theirs. Which, after all, is the current state of affairs. It’s only that the people who believe those things about Bush and the people who believe those things about Obama live in different parts of the country.”

Fair enough. If about 10% of the population believes Obama is a Muslim, and if we’re willing to speculate that the same 10% believe adherence to Islam is somehow a bad thing, the next question is where these misguided people live. If they’re mostly clustered in uncompetitive states that Obama is likely to lose anyway, then the ignorance will likely be without consequence.

If, however, it’s evenly distributed, and about one-in-10 voters everywhere is this confused about Obama’s faith tradition, it’s more likely to have an impact.

Any guesses?

… if we’re willing to speculate that the same 10% believe adherence to Islam is somehow a bad thing…

Good point. “What’s a Muslim?” would be a fair follow-up question. Odds are more than 10% of American voters would get it wrong.

  • “18 percent believe the sun revolves around the Earth”

    Really? That is quite a startling number.

    The follow up question should have been “What does 2 plus 2 equal”?

  • It’s really hard to let go of a conspiracy theory. 10 percent probably think McCain is a Manchurian candidate due to his time as a POW. I don’t believe it’s fruitful to spend much effort persuading the 10 percenters (though identifying who they are may be useful). After all, 28 percent still support Bush. Some people will not respond to facts.

  • I’m just not sure, from a political perspective, whether this is reassuring or not.

    V. little is reassuring about humanity, taken as a whole.

    Taken individually, you can find many many reasons to have hope.

  • Well since there is no “Center” to space, and it’s all relative I suppose you could argue that the Earth IS the center of the universe as it’s the only planet that has intelligent life…

    …or Semi intelligent that the case may be!

    BTW, count me in that 23% who have chilled with a ghost. I was working early at my college at 5am, no lie.

  • If you think those are crazy beliefs, get this one: Some 20% of Americans believe George W Bush is doing a good job.

    I’m not making this up.

  • The question is would the people who think he’s a Muslim vote for him if they knew he wasn’t a Muslim. I’m going to guess No. So … who cares?

    Sorry, I have to take a time out for a little Stats wonkery.

    While this break down is kind of interesting in a totally depressing sort of way (19% of people didn’t know the U.S. gained independence from G.B.??) There are a couple of problems with this collection of polls:

    1. It’s a collection of polls. Or a collection of data from different groups of people interviewed for different reasons. Some polls look at the participants’ party affiliation or voting status. Some don’t. Some look at race or gender or both. Some don’t.

    2. Because the reporter just grabbed a bunch of numbers from a bunch of surveys all it really tells you is some people believe some dumb things. Duh. Does extrapolating that random collection of data allow you to predict anything else about their behavior? Only maybe possibly if you have at least one other overarching survey of all of the participants of the individual surveys.

    Sorry to wander off topic but if the White House tried a stunt like this, I’d be frothing mad. I’m not crazy about The Politico but lazy reporters seem to be the rule, not the exception, these days.

  • Well of course the earth is the center of the universe, at the moment. Becuz wherever I am, that’s where the universe center is – and I’m on Earth, for now… I’ll probably go some other place after Rev. Hagee’s Armageddon finally happens – what’s the hold-up, y’all???

  • I think what we can learn from this is that a disturbingly high percentage of humanity – say, 30% – is, and always will be, insane.

  • God help me, I have to quote Gallagher at this point. He once said: “Twenty-five percent of all Americans are stupid. So, I don’t worry about things like ten percent unemployment. I worry about the other fifteen percent of stupid people who have jobs!”

    If only we could convince all these morons that the ghost of Saddam Hussein is waiting in every voting booth with a weapon of mass destruction that George W Bush already knows about. Then we’d be getting somewhere.

  • “…22 percent believe President Bush knew about the 9/11 attacks in advance.”

    Does thinking that Commander Codpiece knew SOMETHING was going to happen count in this 22%? If so, then I’m part of the people with a “wildly out-of-the-mainstream view.”

    Yes, I’ve heard of the conspiracies about the buildings, and no, that’s not what I’m talking about. I generally accept the 9/11 Commision’s findings.

    But to ignore the intelligence community so completely, to conveniently be out of Washington (coward), and his stunned reaction while holding “My Pet Goat” add up to my feeling that they “Let It Happen On Purpose (LIHOP).”

    OK, it’s only a hunch, a gut reaction, but looking at how willing they are to waste lives, is it really that much of a stretch? BTW, if I was asked if I felt W “knew about 9/11 in advance,” stated like that, I’d say no.

  • How many of the people who answer “Yes” to the question “Is Obama a Muslim?” are buying into the right wing claim that he was born a Muslim and therefore can be counted as one (and an Apostate at that), even if he’s never practiced or identified himself as such?

  • If about 10% of the population believes Obama is a Muslim, and if we’re willing to speculate that the same 10% believe adherence to Islam is somehow a bad thing

    Whoa — that makes no sense at all. We’ve established that these 10% are fairly out of touch with the world, so it’s ludicrous to assume that they are uniform in their opinion of whether being a Muslim is a good or bad thing.

    Heck, if were talking about 10% of Americans — 30 million people — I’m willing to bet that more than a few of them are Muslim. Are we supposed to believe that those folks hold their erroneous view of Obama’s faith against him? And then there are doubtlessly some who are Christian, or atheist, but who are secular enough not to care.

    It’s weak to write an article discussing ignorance and perspective and then to toss in such an ignorant assumption yourself. Steve, you do fantastic work and TCR is the first site I check in the morning, but this is two overheated articles just today. Maybe it’s time for a deep breath or a quick vacation? Politics is stressful stuff, and it’s all too easy to get wrapped up in it, but TCR has been a fantastic break from that kind of stuff. Please don’t go down the road of “if we assume something that’s wildly unlikely…”

  • My one hope is that those ignorant dead-enders are a small enough part of the population that we can elect the democrat this November and start turning things around. If Obama makes it into the White House, he almost certainly won’t be able to change everything in even two administrations, let alone just one. But we need to get started down that road now. We can’t afford to wait any longer.

    The problem is, McBush may very well have a good chance of making it into the White House. It depends on how well he is able to ride his media-enabled image through the election, and a lot of that rests on how the public perceives him. If these ignorant dead-enders are more influential than the numbers make them look, we’re in a lot of trouble.

  • Hey, some percentage still believes that McCain is a maverick straight-shooter, lobbyist hater, all evidence to the contrary.

    And that’s the press.

    Not much that can be done about any of this.

  • A lot bigger percentage of people believe that McCain is a moderate. And THAT is a problem.

  • The dumbing down of America has been a rousing success.

    Naw, the chuckleheads you will always have with you. Dimness on any given topic will be widespread, and will shock those even marginally in the know. For example, I am shockingly ignorant about anything to do with sports, life insurance or fine cuisine. Proud of it, too!

  • I think 10% is a low number. And it’s not uniformly distributed throughout the population.

    Far more worrisome is the famous 28%, who approve of the job GWB is doing.

    50% don’t believe in evolution.

    Freedom of speech is the only right in the First Amendment that a majority of Americans were able to identify.

    I think cracking the 10% barrier on any question would be tough in this country. Really. I think I saw once where more than 10% were unable to name the vice president.

    I actually think the 7%-10% range here is encouraging. I’d also guess that far more couldn’t identify who Wright is. And I wish I couldn’t, to be perfectly honest. I try to tune this pastor nonsense out as much as I can, and I imagine millions of others do, too. This is media-churned turmoil and crisis. Millions ignore these stories, and well they should.

  • Are you implying the Sun stopped revolving around the Earth?
    Shouldn’t we be worried?

    I wonder if the 18% don’t understand the word/phrase “revolve around”.
    I suspect a good portion of them didn’t – still don’t probably.

  • I wonder how many people would respond that they think McCain is a Muslim, if the question were posed.

  • After seeing polling that found around 20% of responders believe in Santa Claus or Alien Abductions, I’ve determined that when you get to 20% or below you’re just polling the insane/uninformed/preternaturally stupid.

  • Are we talking about 1 in 10 voters or 10% of the general public? There is a large group of people that don’t believe that it is worth their time or effort to vote. This is pure speculation, but perhaps the people that believe that Obama is a Muslim fall into that larger subset of the population that does not participate in electoral politics?

    I don’t see much profit in worrying about those that cannot be convinced. Bush has proved that roughly 25% of the public can’t be reached by facts, in any event.

  • It’s because shillary and the bush-clinton-bush-obama crime family syndicate use kkkrove tactics to convice 10% of people that Obama is a Muslim.

  • Plant a seed in some peoples’ heads and it will grow no matter what they see that contradicts it especially if that belief cements them to those that share the same belief or if it reinforces something the people already believed. Sad fact, but a lot of people believe all kinds of goofy shit in this country. And America’s high school drop out rate is over 30%! Minds are plenty fertile for seed planting out there.

  • More context: sometimes people will stubbornly SAY something they may not necessarily BELIEVE just because admitting reality means admitting that you’re wrong. People may be motivated by things other than the desire to honestly answer the pollster’s question. It could be, for example, a fervent desire to find something (anything!) bad about Obama that would justify not voting for a Democrat in November. Therefore, McCain is a saintly war veteran and Obama is an elitist Islamofascist freak with a crazy Christian pastor. Reality be damned, if you WANT something bad enough, the answers present themselves.

  • Agreed, jimBOB. There will always be a healthy percentage of impressionable idiots. Intelligence is an aptitude, just like everything else. So — along with people who can’t carry a tune, throw a knuckleball, model lingerie, drive a straight-shift, decorate a cake, work a VCR, proofread, fight bare-fisted, curl their tongue, belch the Preamble to the Constitution, remember pi, write a letter, wink, distinguish Charlie Parker from Lester Young, dance, floss, hold their bladder, or pick at a scab on their elbow without eating it — their will always be brain-dead adults who can stare at the facts laid before them and still not be able to block out the sound of Rush Limbaugh’s voice.

    They’re called Republicans. And they can’t help it.

  • Brooks,
    I find your argument implausible. One thing we can safely say about the 10% in question is that they hold a belief that is contrary to all available objective evidence, and which could be easily refuted with even the most modest of efforts. Typically when people hold views like that it’s because they want their belief to be true. Maybe there’s a handful of Muslims out there who think it would be really cool to have one of their own as president and are therefore willfully deluding themselves, but it seems far more reasonable to me to assume that the vast majority of these people are those who are opposed to Obama to begin with and are latching on to the Muslim rumor to give their opposition some basis in reason. But this works only if we grant the premise that being a Muslim renders a person unfit for the presidency– i.e., is a bad thing. Another argument leading to the same conclusion is the fact that these people apparently get their news from right-wing chain emails, in which case it’s reasonable to assume that they also credit the various slanders against Islam that are frequently put forth in that medium.

  • I think alot of those people think Obama is “Muslim” not Muslim. “Muslim” meaning different, non-white, threatening to MY status-quo, non-mainstream, vaguely foreign or to sum it up: too different than ME. Those are vote he would never get under any circumstance, so its really a waste of time worrying about them.

  • Note to self:
    Join 22% club that believes Shrub knew in advance about 9/11 – BAD.
    Join 30% club that believes Saddam had WMD – BAD.
    Join 23% club that believes in ghosts – BAD.
    Join 18% club that believes earth is center of universe – BAD.
    Join 11% club that believes Obama is Muslim – BAD.
    Join 80% club that believes in Cosmic Santa Claus – GOOD.

  • The one that strikes me as the most absurd is that the Sun revolves around the Earth.

    And the Earth is only 6000 years old.

    This is all science.

    How can we expect them to understand any level of nuance if they can’t even get basic science?

    We’re so screwed. The dumbing down of this country is working better than their wildest dreams.

    No wonder they don’t want GI’s to get edumacated. Those are more often rural people whose education is shrouded in church doctrine. Science is evil.

    Those numbers are sad and sobering.

  • I could be wrong, but to me “18 percent believe the sun revolves around the Earth.” means that roughly 15 percent of Americans have trouble parsing even relatively simple questions. What I mean is that people are not just misinformed, they are sometimes quite dense, to the point where they will get their own name wrong approximately 10% of the time. So, “Does the Sun revolve around the Earth?” is like a control question, just to see if they’re even paying attention. The percentage getting it wrong is a fair indication of the overall margin of error for the population.

  • Simply put, there’s nothing “reassuring” about the level of stupidity in this country.

    (I would suggest reading the press in other countries to compare them with ours — there’s a startling amount of laziness and vapidity in US-based media outlets, and our educational system is a horror as well.)

    Aren’t we the only industrialized country in the world still “debating” whether global warming is real or not? That’s some high-grade stupid there. It’s right on par with “see that cliff up ahead? Floor it.”

  • chrenson #12: “God help me, I have to quote Gallagher at this point.”

    Gallagher IS God.

  • One of the 20% who still loves Bush sent me a video just the other day about Barack HUSSEIN Obama that had clips of people pontificating on it like Ann Coulter…I was so angry I deleted it. Now I wished I had saved it. Anyway, it is a deliberate swiftboat thing going around the Internet…

  • “22 percent believe President Bush knew about the 9/11 attacks in advance.”

    BuzzMon@13 has a good point.

    The question plays right into conspiracy nut-bags. The other questions really don’t.

  • I meant that I agree with BuzzMon that Bush “knew something” ahead of time.

  • JRD, so are you saying that *none* of those 10% are Muslim themselves, or that those who are also hold negative opinions of themselves?

    Expecting uniformity in diverse populaces is silly. Even 10% of Americans represents a huge swath of age, regligiosity, life experience, and ethnicity (of course, that 10% will skew differently than 10% of *all* Americans). Saying that everyone who thinks Obama is a Muslim ipso facto thinks that’s a bad thing reflects on your assumptions and rationality, not theirs.

    Of course, I fully expect that *most* of those 10% are right wing Republicans who do indeed see Islam as a scary thing; I was taking Steve to task for jumping from a reasonable “most” to a extremist and irrational “all” and backing it up with the weak “if we speculate” clause.

  • Brooks,
    I am saying that it is perfectly reasonable to assume that the number within the 10% who do not view being a Muslim as a bad thing is negligible, which is obviously what Steve meant and is a perfectly acceptable way of stating generalizations. If your point is that there might be one or two individual exceptions to Steve’s premise within the population of thousands of people that we’re discussing, then it is nothing more than pointless semantic contrarianism. I hardly need to be lectured on rationality by someone who evidently fails to appreciate that any statement of generality implicitly accommodates the possibility of a statistically negligible number of exceptions to the general rule.

  • Outside of the 9/11 conspiratorialists, I’m pretty sure that Obama-is-a-Muslim and the sun revolving around the earth are pretty thoroughly southern white people (as my Louisiana-born ex-wife used to say, “Southerners, the biggest hearts and the narrowest minds on the planet”).

    I gotta say that those who disbelieve the heliocentric solar system are just toooooooo fraaaaakkkkkkkinnnnnggggggg DUMB to even qualify as members of the same species.

  • Sorry I didn’t read all the comments if this point has been suggested already.

    11% don’t believe that Obama is a Muslim. They believe that they can claim that they believe that Obama is a Muslim (because his dad was and Islamic law says religion follows the father) and thus have an excuse not to vote for him (other then either pure racism or pure liberal-hating).

    So if you run into one (are they real), tell them the truth. Not that Obama is a Christian, but that you know they are lying about their ‘beliefs’.

  • “I meant that I agree with BuzzMon that Bush “knew something” ahead of time.”

    Ok, call me a kook, but I thought on the morning of 9/11 as it was happening that something wasn’t right about the whole mess. The events that have followed (the savage assault on the Constution, the war in Iraq, the cash faucet turned on full over well connected contractors) have convinced me I was right. We know an unprovoked invasion of Iraq was a neocon goal in the 1990’s, and they stated it would take a major incident to achieve it. We know the admistration had serious warnings in the months before 9/11.

    My crackpot theory: They needed an Islamic event to put their plans into motion. They used Oklahoma City as their template and calculated an event of that size would enflame the public enough and at the same time would be a managable, contained tragedy. I’m not saying George Bush or his adminstration knew about the 9/11 attacks, but I think they turned a blind eye to warnings as a calculated risk. 9/11 was so mamoth because the warnings were ignored.

    We’ll be dead long before the whole truth of 9/11, and Iraq and the rest of the Bush adminstration’s crimes are fully understood.

  • JRD, I think you’re wrong, and from reading TCR for a months, I think that even Steve would agree that speculation was a mistake.

    First, let’s look at the actual survey.

    The actual numbers: 14% of Republicans, 10% of Democrats, and 8% of Independents think Obama is a Muslim (or did in March, anyway). Maybe I’m too much of an optimist, or maybe I’m nit-picking, but even if we accept that virtually every confused Republican is strongly anti-Muslim, I’m not prepared to say the same of confused Democrats and independents.

    At the very least, I’m not willing to say so without some actual evidence, and, once again, I think it’s weak to substitute “if we speculate” for that evidence. Heck, you may believe it, but what has historically distinguished TCR from dailykos and whatnot is the quality and rationality of the writing. I was merely pointing out a lapse in those high standards in the spirit of constructive criticism.

  • “I meant that I agree with BuzzMon that Bush “knew something” ahead of time.”

    I don’t know. It’s easy for me to believe that Bush knew nothing before 9/11. And knows nothing now.

    Just sayin’.

  • SaintZac@44 says it better than I can.

    “My crackpot theory: They needed an Islamic event to put their plans into motion. They used Oklahoma City as their template and calculated an event of that size would enflame the public enough and at the same time would be a managable, contained tragedy. I’m not saying George Bush or his adminstration knew about the 9/11 attacks, but I think they turned a blind eye to warnings as a calculated risk. 9/11 was so mamoth because the warnings were ignored.”

    I am NOT a conspiricist; in fact I might be the only person in the world who believes Oswald got off three lucky shots with his old rifle. BUT, I do think Bush knew “something”. What that “something” was, I don’t know, and, as Zak also points out, we might never know.

    The reason that I don’t generally believe in “conspiracies” is that NO ONE in this country can keep their mouths shut. According to Oliver Stone, everyone from Texas oilmen, the CIA, gay New Orleans, Cubans, the Russians, LBJ, etc may have wanted Kennedy dead, BUT,according to me, the minute you get more than one person involved, you have two people who can’t keep quiet.

    I also don’t believe Bush or his friends had anything to do with the attacks – those fuckers are too stupid to do anything involving complicated planning – but I do think they may have known “something” was up.

  • I think it’s a fair assumption that a large number of that 10% have never actually heard of Obama, have never voted in an election before and simply think Obama sounds like a foreign name. Talk about politics to random people you meet and you will be surprised how little most of them know about any of their elected officials or about any public policy issue. We’re a democracy, and many take advantage of their freedom to go about their life without caring about the world beyond their personal influence. It’s not that they’re stupid or ignorant, they just don’t have any interest in knowing.

  • There you go, thinking like an empiricist again. As I wrote here, the conservative movement’s greatest failing has been in shirking empiricism. This goes a bit beyond Machiavelli, where you do whatever it takes to win, here, conservatives believe whatever it takes to win.

    So, you look and say, logically, one cannot be a radical black Panther Christian zealot, and a Muslim, as well as a Muslim-Apostate, which is so offensive it will send Osama Bin Laden on a recruiting mission the likes of which we’ll never see, because they are mutually exclusive.

    Now, a conservative looks at this and says, Obama being a Muslim hurts Obama, so he’s a Muslim. In this case, being a black, Christian zealot hurts Obama, so he’s a Christian zealot. In this setting, Obama being a Muslim-Apostate, the least of all possible Muslims, the anti-Muslim as it were, of the Muslim world, and so he’s the anit-Muslim.

    Observations don’t come into play. These answers are revealed through pure cynicism. What helps us and hurts everyone else is true, what hurts us is false.

    Find an exception to that rule, I dare you.

    Occam’s Razor – the simplest explanation is the true one: they aren’t empricists.

  • About the whole 9/11 thing: someone had to know. If no one did, how did all that dynamite get in there?

    WTC 7? Really? Fires? From where?

    Molten steel? From jet fuel? Sorry, but you “scientists” in here should realize that the same people who think the “sun revolves around the earth” also buy the argument “jet fuel melts steal.”

  • Brooks,

    You’re now at least making an argument that extends beyond the example of one or two Muslims who might for whatever misguided reason take Obama to be a member of their faith (frankly I find that highly implausible if only for the reason that Muslims would know better than to assume that anyone with a Middle-Eastern-sounding name is automatically a practitioner of Islam). But two points: first, I think you give Democrats too much credit in your reluctance to believe that a substantial number of them might have an anti-Muslim bias. The results of the Democratic primaries in West Virginia and Kentucky, in which about 20 percent of voters said that the race of the candidate was “important” to their vote (a bloc which overwhelmingly voted for Clinton) disabused me of any naive notions that the Democratic base in all areas of the country is a bastion of enlightened liberalism. Second, your assertion that Steve’s speculation was made in the absence of “evidence” is a straw man of the highest order (and reminds me once again of why I quickly burned out on the self-styled “skeptics” groups populating the Internet these days). You are, I’m sure, familiar with the concept of an educated guess. We all recognize that there is no rational basis for the belief that Obama is a Muslim, as anyone with the slightest genuine interest in the question could easily find mountains of evidence to the contrary. That being the case, it makes sense to look for irrational explanations for why people would claim to hold that belief, and the most obvious one is that people are accepting(or at least claiming to accept) the Muslim meme as an excuse not to vote for or support Obama; as I stated above, however, the assertion that Obama is a Muslim provides an excuse for not supporting him only if being a Muslim is a bad thing. Ergo, it hardly seems a stretch to infer that, discounting some negligible minority as a nod to semantic pedantry, people who believe that Obama is a Muslim also believe that being a Muslim is a bad thing.

    If you want evidence for this hypothesis, you can find some in the statistics discussed in this post. The link you provided in your last post is not to the Newsweek poll that Steve references above, but to an article about a Pew Research poll taken on March 27, 2008 (this is the poll to which Ben Smith refers in the entry that Steve quotes, so obviously your reliance on it was not in bad faith). The Newsweek poll is here: http://www.newsweek.com/id/138462 (the Muslim question is # 15). The trend that the Newsweek poll reveals is surprising: as opposed to the Pew poll conducted in March, a larger percentage of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents (13%) now indicate a belief that Obama is a Muslim than did Republicans and Republican-leaning independents (10%). This trend supports the hypothesis that the Muslim meme is (consciously or not, depending on whether the individual in question is attempting to delude himself as well as others) a cover for racism or some other irrational or otherwise inappropriate opposition to Obama, as that hypothesis would predict that more Democrats– who otherwise might be expected to support the Democratic candidate for president– than Republicans– who already have an excuse for supporting McCain– would adopt the Muslim meme in order to justify their decision to support the Republican candidate.

    In short, I agree with your statement that “[e]xpecting uniformity in diverse populaces is silly,” But it’s also silly to “take to task,” as you put it, a highly plausible general statement on the ground that there could conceivably be a minute number of individual cases to which the generality does not apply. Such is the nature of generalities, as I’m sure the author of this blog and its readers well understand.

  • 9/11 was an inside job and more than 22% don’t buy the crazy conspiracy theory that an old man needing dialysis and living in a cave somehow planned it.

  • Morgan Reynolds, part of chimpy’s 2001 initial “dream team” now gives presentations around the country that bush and cheney are the most dishonest, criminal socio-paths you will ever meet.

    He worked closely with them – knows them better than the original poster or any comm enters in this thread. He keeps a Website about this because we cannot let them destroy our democracy and criminals need to be brought to justice.

    This is a highly credible insider – take a look:

    http://www.nomoregames.net/

  • Reynolds says that they know and that it was an inside job. He also has strategies to get this out in the open.

  • Re: WMD, I wonder how many people actually know what a WMD is. I had a big blow-up one day a couple years ago with my mother (a Republican elected official in a rural PA county) over the fact that we never found WMDs in Iraq.

    Fox News was on the TV and on comes some report describing a big stash of conventional explosives that we had just found. She says, “Well, what about that?” I had to explain to her that a WMD was something that could kill people on a very large scale – like a nuclear, chemical, or biological weapon.

  • We’re assuming the 10% who tell pollsters that they think Obama is Muslim actually believe it.

    I can’t say what proportion lies, but I’m willing to bet some respondents push that poll in the direction they like, just as they push the poll that asks “Is Dubya doing a heckuva job?”
    28% SAY they approve. How many actually do? Less. Maybe a lot less.

    Would these same people feign ignorance hoping that a high enough number could sew seeds of doubt in the minds of those that see the poll?

    Am I giving these Neanderthals too much credit for strategy?

  • little bear, you actually thnk 9/11 was in an inside job? Are you serious? Have you been taking all your medications?

  • If the Bush Administration plotted 9/11, the planes never would have hit the buildings.

    Hey… there’s our anti-terror plan – put Bush in charge of Al Qaeda!

  • Baruch Hussein O’bama? Of course he’s a Muslim, but the outrage doesn’t stop there, since the Muslim bit is in the middle, like sandwich filling. He’s a Jew first and a d….d Irish Catholic on top. What else can one think?

  • You can get 10% of the population to believe anything. Having never been polled on anything and not knowing anyone who has ever been polled on anything I always question who they are polling.

    I doubt this makes much difference as we saw one WV elderly lady state she didn’t trust anyone named Hussein. We must live with the fact that at least 10% of Americans are stupid as shit and do what we can to inform. But so many stupid people have learned to keep their mouths shut while the rest of them pose as journalist and can’t keep their mouths shut. Seriously, 10% is hardly of concern.

  • So 10% believe Obama is a Muslim. How much’ cha wanna bet that 75% can’t tell you one thing that a Muslim believes in.

  • Of course 9/11 was an inside job and you cannot prove otherwise. No one wants to believe it but with all the evidence uncovered the only way to not know it was an inside job is to not want to know and apparently you don’t want to know because it’s obvious you haven’t looked at the evidence. And it’s not the least bit suspicious that Bush and Cheney had to testify together…without a transcript…an not under oath. But hey, you know you can trust them. Cheney was just conveniently keeping all our fighters busy with training exercises that day at exactly that time designed to make them not respond to a terrorist attack…coincidently the British were doing the same type of exercises on 7/11 when they were attacked.

    When conspiracies are true conspirators are the first to laugh them off as ridiculous. That’s why there has never been a real 9/11 investigation and why the crime scene was cleaned up so quickly with investigative personnel like FEMA and others not allowed on the sight. If you haven’t looked at the evidence then you have no bases to dismiss charges of conspiracy. If you are naive enough to believe those at the helm of government could not have such motivations then I suggest you look at what they were doing in the private sector before they got into government.

  • There is about 30% of the electorate that simply won’t vote for Obama under any conditions whatsoever. The 10% who won’t vote for Obama because they think he is a Muslim mostly come from that same group, and guess what? Most of them wouldn’t vote for any other Democrat. These are the people who think that Bush has done a heckuva job.

    Worrying over where these people are is pointless. They are where they are and it is doubtful that more than a handful of them would vote for any Democrat under any circumstances. If they haven’t figured out that Bush has flushed this country down the toilet, they’ll never figure out that Obama isn’t a Muslim or that their best interests lie with the Democrats.

  • Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that. — George Carlin

  • Interested – you may think you know more than everyone else, Morgan Reynolds was THERE, worked with everyone in that criminal cabal.

    Proclaim what you want – the majority of American’s question the crazy conspiracy theory that states a sick old man on a dialysis machine in a cave in Afghanistan mastermind and coordinated this from a cell phone (while on his kidney machine in a cave, right?).

    But if you think you know more than highly-qualified people were actually in the White House – go ahead, talk like a smart @ss.

  • I remember seeing a video back in January or so of an older woman — a Democratic caucaser from Iowa!!! — who said she thought some of the things Obama said were OK but she just couldn’t vote for a Muslim. This is someone engaged enough to vote in the Dem primary. This is just one example but if the figure posted above (in no. 45) that 10% of Dems think Obama is a Muslim (and therfore won’t vote for him), this is a huge problem so I don’t think we can write off this group as unlikely to vote for him anyway. Maybe 10% of this 10% can be informed and flipped, and some state like Iowa or wherever and its electoral votes can be just tilted for Obama in Nov.

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