@blatham,
blatham wrote:
- Nearly half of Trump supporters believe that Obama was not born in the US
- Likewise, nearly half of Republicans (43%) believe Obama is a Muslim
- And then there's the Rubio statements of belief (noted earlier) that Obama knows exactly what he's doing and that is to...
Quote:Asked by CNN's Chris Cuomo if the senator believes Obama is "intentionally trying to destroy the country," Rubio spokesman Alex Conant said, "Absolutely."
http://cnn.it/20Wb5Ay
Now, that's a LOT of insanity.
The thing is, this stuff is repeated every single day on right wing radio and said or intimated every single day on Fox. These people get their ideas from somewhere and that's where.
And the GOP has not, in any significant way, fought back against this fomenting of insanity. They have utilized it and fostered it for electoral gains and for ideological convenience.
Your party has gone stark raving nuts, george.
I don't know the source or the quality of your statistics for "Trump supporters". Certainly there are uncertainties associated both with the survey questions themselves and the identification of Trump supporters. We have all seen film clips of people asked rather simple questions based on what we suppose is common knowledge, only to be amazed at the ignorance of basic facts that prevails among many people..
It's also true that Obama was raised during his years in Indonesia as a Muslim, and, by his own account, that experience has left strong impressions with him. He has certainly demonstrated a high degree of sensitivity and perhaps sympathy with Islam - even to the point of (rather absurdly I think) refusing to acknowledge the existence of something others call Islamist terrorism (something which even the Saudis have criticized). That, and his odd treatment of the nascent but aborted green revolution in Iran and the still unfolding disintegration of Arab states in the Middle East has given many serious, well informed people serious concern.
I'll grant you that there is a lot of gross oversimplification of issues and even prejudgments out there on political matters. However, these things are not the exclusive province of "the right" as you repratedly suggest.
I suppose I could tout the "insanity" of Bernie Sanders supporters for believing his pie in the sky promises with hardly a word about how he would pay for them, or how our economy might perfiorm under the tax & regulatory burdens he infers (but never quite reaches the point of describing in detail). Indeed I could cite the rather critical financial problems currently facing Italy, Spain and Greece (all polite modern social democracies), or the chaos affecting Venezuela, or that from which Argentian is emerging .... all to tout the "insanity" of his proposals.
In a similar vein the left wing media are certinly just as persistent and widespread as are their counterparts on the right. Fox has managed to capture a larger audience than MSNBC, but I doubt you would claim that they are any less spokesmen for a particular pollitical point of view than Fox. Same goes for "The New Yorker" and any number of newspaper/magizine publications. I believe the left & right wing media behave in more or less equivalent ways , though that of the left adopts more pretentions of pseudo intellectualism.
I know from our previous conversations that you don't like these equivalence arguments from me. However, I believe them to be true, and I believe that history supports my view.
