In case you missed it: chickenhawk Tancredo punked by Kos
Tom Tancredo walks off the set of “The Ed Show” (with David Shuster sitting in) after military veteran Markos Moulitsas calls him out on his weaseling out of Vietnam “for mental health reasons” after his two prior deferments ran out. Tancredo was a pro-war student activist at the time. (ahem.) BTW, the discussions was actually about healthcare. Watch:
So how many ‘birthers’ are there, anyway?
A new poll sheds light on just how far gone the Republican Party is. Per Politico’s Glenn Thrush:
A whopping 58 percent of Republicans either think Barack Obama wasn’t born in the US (28 percent) or aren’t sure (30 percent). A mere 42 percent think he was. That means a majority of Republicans polled either don’t know about — or don’t believe the seemingly incontrovertible evidence Obama’s camp has presented over and over and over that he was born in Hawaii in ‘61. It also explains why Republicans, including Roy Blunt, are playing footsie with the Birther fringe.
The actual numbers are as follows:
Research 2000 for Daily Kos. 7/27-30. All adults. MoE 2% (No trend lines)
Do you believe that Barack Obama was born in the United States of America or not?
Yes 77
No 11
Not sure 12How do those numbers break down?
Yes No Not sure
Dem 93 4 3
Rep 42 28 30
Ind 83 8 9Northeast 93 4 3
South 47 23 30
Midwest 90 6 4
West 87 7 618-29 88 4 8
30-44 72 14 14
45-59 82 8 10
60+ 69 17 14
So how many crazy, racist people are we really talking about? Well, if you figure that about 23 percent of voters ID as Republicans, and multiply that by the 131,257,328 people who voted in the 2008 presidential election, that gives us roughly 30,189,185 active Republicans as of November 2008. Multiply that number by 58% and you get 17,509,727 who can be classified as at least “soft birthers,” or going with the 28% hardcore birthers, you get 8,452,972 wingnuts lurking around out there, mostly in their mother’s basements, which they have fashioned into end of the world bunkers where they can plan the coming race war — a lot of people to be sure, and a damning percentage for a political party already in decline, but a tiny fraction of the mostly normal, rational U.S. population, and roughly four times the primetime viewership of Fox News (or close to the real-world weekly radio audience for Rush Limbaugh…)
[BTW those dismissing the poll because it was sponsored by the Daily Kos don't understand how polling works. Kos & Co didn't conduct the poll, they hired a professional polling firm and paid them to do it, making them the sponsor, not the creator. So unless you think Research 2000 is an unprofessional hack outfit, the poll is as valid as its methodology.]
Moreover, the 58 percent of Republicans, and 53 percent of Southerners, who either doubt or disbelieve that President Obama is an American, despite all the evidence of his Hawaiian birth (28 percent and 23 percent who have decided for sure), comes within a year of a September 2008 pre-election poll conducted for the AP and Yahoo News (again, not by them, but by researchers at Stanford University,) which found that roughly 40 percent of white Americans (Republicans, Democrats and Independents) held “at least a partly negative view of African-Americans,” the 21 percent of white respondents who said “black leaders are trying to push too fast.” and the 36 percent of white respondents who said blacks are responsible for “most or all of the racial tension today.” (Read the AP/Yahoo/Stanford survey here) plus a 2006 poll that found 13 percent of whites (and 12 percent of blacks) identified themselves as “racially biased.“ In other words, there are simply a number of peole out there with immovable racial attitudes. The birthers are just forcing the rest of us to pay attention to them.
Related: Bill Maher urges the reality based community to fight back. He ends with this zinger:
This isn’t a case of Democrats versus Republicans. It’s sentient beings versus the lizard people, and it is to them I offer this deal: I’ll show you Obama’s birth certificate when you show me Sarah Palin’s high school diploma.
Amen.
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