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A new poll from Vanity Fair and 60 Minutes finds that — in spite of a complete lack of evidence — 24 percent of Americans still believe Pres. Obama was foreign-born. And yet, among these hard-core birthers, nearly a quarter of the citizenry, there is no consensus about where overseas Obama was born — 6 percent said Kenya, 2 percent said Indonesia and 16 percent couldn’t specify, just somewhere other than America. You’d think they would have settled on one place or another by now.
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| Hawaii
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39%
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| Kansas
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1%
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| Someplace else in the U.S.
| 3%
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| Not sure which state
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20%
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| Kenya
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6%
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| Indonesia
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2%
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| Somplace else outside the U.S.
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5%
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| Not sure which country
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11%
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By comparison an Angus Reid Global Monitor poll from March 2010 that around 15 percent of Americans were found to be truthers, the media’s analog to birthers. In the poll, 15 percent said the collapse of the World Trade Center was the result of a controlled demolition, with 11 percent not sure; 15 percent said Flight 93 was shot down over Pennsylvania (22 percent not sure); 13 percent said no plane crashed at the Pentagon (11 percent not sure); and 6 percent said no jets crashed into the World Trade Center towers, meaning the images in the news videos were fake (7 percent weren’t sure).
Even as wiggy as the truthers’ assertions are — the Bush administration was demonstrably way too incompetent to have pulled off such a feat and then could have never kept their coup secret for nine years and counting — their precepts rely on science that is sufficiently complicated to allow bamboozlers to create gray areas in the minds of people who are easily confused or certifiably paranoid.
With the birth certificate, on the other hand, the facts are so black and white — via Think Progress, here, here and here — that the stubborn resistance to them can only be willful ignorance.
After all, birthers need to believe Obama is foreign-born in order to reinforce their rationale that he is ineligible to serve and therefore illegitimate, a usurper and unworthy of respect. (And, oh yeah, he’s black.)
Plus, unlike trutherism, birther theorists are supported by the right wing media — on Fox News and among the hatemongers in the fever swamps of AM radio. There was no corollary media establishment, other than a few blogs and YouTube videos, pushing the line that Bush was behind 9/11.
Of course, context is important. Remember that about 20 percent of Americans still supported Richard Nixon on the day he resigned in order to avoid impeachment, and around the same number still approved of George W. Bush, the Worst President Ever, when he flew back to Texas for the last time, in January 2009.
