Day: June 28, 2010

Poll: Nearly a Quarter of Americans Are Birthers

Jon Ponder
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.
Hawaii 39%
Kansas 1%
Someplace else in the U.S.

3%
Not sure which state 20%
Kenya 6%
Indonesia 2%
Somplace else outside the U.S. 5%
Not sure which country 11%

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.

Schwarzenegger’s Failure Provides a Cautionary Tale about Electing Novices in Times of Crisis

Jon Ponder

Scharzenegger, in cockier times
Scharzenegger, in cockier times
It’s true that Arnold Schwarzenegger will be leaving Sacramento in disgrace in January, and the Washington Post gets it right that the genesis of his failure lies in the fact that he was a political novice and outsider — just like the current Republican candidate to take his place:

After nearly six years in office, Schwarzenegger has few friends left in either party. The state budget deficit hovers around $20 billion; his approval rating has sunk below 25 percent.

“We thought he was going to be a great governor, but he has been a great disappointment,” said Geneviève M. Clavreul, a Republican activist.

As candidates in races across the country try to position themselves as the politician with the least political experience, Schwarzenegger’s troubles in California illustrate some of the possible downsides of outsiderdom. Like Whitman, the GOP’s candidate for governor, and Fiorina, the party’s Senate nominee, Schwarzenegger came to office as a non-politician who would solve problems with unconventional ideas.

He had some successes, but the movie star stumbled as he tried to navigate the state’s political establishment, with its touchy egos and endless compromises. He floundered as he tried to tame the state’s runaway budget and push through ambitious reforms such as universal health care.

“Touchy egos?” — please. This man spent his career in Hollywood, where dealing with egomaniacs is the price of admission. And while Schwarzenegger may not be “touchy,” he is saddled with an over-sized ego himself — where do you think he got the foolish notion that he could govern California?

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Verbatim

Buck Banks

No one has to be afraid of the Best Party because it is the best party. If it wasn’t, it would be called the Worst Party or the Bad Party. We would never work with a party like that.

— Comedian Jon Gnarr, leader of the Best Party and newly elected mayor of Reykyavik, Iceland, quoted in a New York Times profile.

The ‘Ick Factor,’ And Why Huckabee Will Never Be President

Jon Ponder
Left: Huckabee family several years ago, Mike and Janet Huckabee more recently
Left: Huckabee family several years ago, Mike and Janet Huckabee more recently

The New Yorker has profile of Mike Huckabee up that explores the possibility that he may be the Republicans’ “best hope” to take on Pres. Obama in 2012. If he is, there’s at least one quote from the interview on social issues that will likely turn off reasonable independent voters (and any of the few remaining Republicans who are rational) down the road:

I asked him to explain his rationale for opposing gay rights. “I do believe that God created male and female and intended for marriage to be the relationship of the two opposite sexes,” he said. “Male and female are biologically compatible to have a relationship. We can get into the ick factor, but the fact is two men in a relationship, two women in a relationship, biologically, that doesn’t work the same.” [Emphasis added.]

“Ick” is in the mind of the beholder. For example — and with apologies in advance if you are eating as you read this, dear reader — but imagine just for a second, Huckabee and his wife Janet belly to belly making the beast with two backs, doing the nasty and hiding the salami — fill in your own euphemism, just so long as your imaginary Huckabees are doing it missionary style.

See? Ick. Who wants to think of these two bruisers having sex? No one. And yet, Mike Huckabee — a supposedly serious Republican candidate for president in 2012 — rests the foundation of his justification for the use of constitutional amendments in 45 states and federal laws like the Defense of Marriage Act to restrict millions of Americans’ civil right to marry a picture in his puerile mind of what these people do in bed.

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