Are most Republicans as crazy as most Democrats?

The unreasoning hate most Democrats held (and still hold) toward former President Bush is a matter of record. The proven lies about his supposedly having been AWOL during his National Guard service, the slanders concerning the intelligence of a man who holds two degrees from Ivy League schools and has a higher IQ, as measured by military tests, than Al Gore, and the nonsense about a vote count in Florida supervised in all the contested counties entirely by Democratic election officials having been stolen by Bush in 2000 continue to be repeated to this day, despite the conclusive evidence to the contrary. Democrats even continue to repeat even flimsier evidence that Ohio in 2004 was somehow stolen. The mantra that "Bush lied" about weapons of mass destruction believed by every intelligence service in the world to have been possessed by Saddam Hussein continues to reverberate, and not only off the walls of padded cells.

But no poll to my knowledge ever showed that the "Truthers-" the nut jobs who believe that Bush personally arranged 9/11- are a majority in the Democratic party, or anything close to it. However a new Harris poll does show that 45 percent of Republicans believe the discredited nonsense that President Obama was not born in the United States (Hawaii has certified that it issued a birth certificate to Barack Hussein Obama II). Even worse, a large majority- 57%- falsely believe President Obama, who attended Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago for twenty years, to be a Muslim!

Not only that, but more than a quarter believe that Obama may be the Antichrist!

If that poll is accurate, it goes a long way toward proving that a majority of Republicans are just as crazy as a majority of Democrats- and that's scary.

We Republicans need to take a look at ourselves. America needs at least one political party the members of which live, for the most part, in the realm of reality. It sure isn't going to be the Democrats, and that means that it's up to us.

ADDENDUM: The Columbia Journalism Review has attacked the methodology of the Harris poll, charging it, among other things, with asking leading questions designed to elicit precisely the extremist responses it got. Maybe the Republicans, at least, are not as crazy as it would appear at first glance.

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