Finally quantified: the ignorance of Obama voters
So I’ve been harping on to all my friends and family lately that we need a literacy test or some other kind of citizenship test because most of the voters who determine our national policy either have no stake in government whatsoever or are completely uninformed about the candidates and/or issues. The results of Zogby’s latest poll may inspire feelings of wanting to jump off of a very tall building, so if you haven’t already heard the anecdotal evidence presented by Howard Stern on the stupidity of Obama supporters, prime yourself with a little laughter first:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyvqhdllXgU]
OK, all set? The results of Zogby’s latest poll suggest that Obama voters aren’t the sharpest tools in the shed. Hold on a sec, I need to put on my surprise face. OK, let’s continue.
Some of my favorites:
36.5% of Obama voters thought Republicans are in control of both Houses of Congress.
86.9% of Obama voters thought Sarah Palin actually said that she could see Russia from her house.
Only 23.4% of Obama voters knew that Obama claimed to have campaigned in 57 states.
Only 28.2% of Obama voters correctly identified Joe Biden as having had to drop out of a previous political campaign because he plagiarized speeches.
Only 17.4% of Obama voters knew that Obama had won his first election by getting all of his opponents kicked off the ballot.
Only 11.6% of Obama voters recognized that Obama said his policies would likely bankrupt the coal industry and make energy rates skyrocket.
56.1% of Obama supporters were unaware that Obama started his political career at the home of two former members of the Weather Underground.
81% of Obama supporters were aware that he wanted the government to redistribute the wealth (Excellent! Mob rule in HD!)
Do not despair! In a moment I’ll ask all of you to join me in giving a huge round of applause to the media for the wonderful job they did campaigning for, I mean covering the Obama campaign, but there is some light at the end of the tunnel that I should probably mention, purely for the sake of being fair and balanced. The election of the President of the United States was not determined by a completely uneducated and ignorant mob. There was one issue, absolutely critical to national security and the direction of the nation in general, about which almost all Obamatons were informed. In fact, they were more correctly informed on this issue than any others in the entire survey.
93.8% of Obama supporters knew that Sarah Palin had a pregnant teenage daughter.
Now you can all join me in that round of applause. What the hell, I think this actually warrants a standing ovation.
Added 11/19/08:Interview with John Ziegler, who commissioned the Zogby poll
23% of Texans thought Obama was a Muslim just a week before the election.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/hotstories/6084678.html
65% of Republicans thought there was a link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11, 5 years after the events took place.
http://www.zogby.com/News/ReadNews.cfm?ID=1169
There are intelligent and unintelligent people on both sides.
Manbaby, I’m racking my brain but can’t seem to figure out the point of your comment. What is it?
The are dumb people that are liberal and there are dumb people that are conservative. Do you really think that if you asked a different set of questions to everyone that voted for McCain that you couldn’t cherrypick some out to make everyone that voted for him look stupid?
I haven’t gotten into it, because I don’t care whether Obama is a Muslim or things Jesus was a black, Marxist rebel (the more likely scenario, IMHO). Since Texas went something like 55/44% for McCain, almost half of those 26% of Texans probably voted for Obama, but then again I don’t know the sample. I can see the conveniently built in suggestion that it’s Republicans, though since it’s Texas, though. Clever.
As for 65% of Republicans thinking there’s a link between Saddam and 9/11, can you really blame them? The media has been accusing Bush/Cheney for making that link for 8 years. Big giant straw man.
I’m curious if you think there’s equal stupidity on both sides or if you think one side tends to benefit more from public ignorance and/or lack of education. If you don’t think it’s Democrats who benefit most then you’re just lying to yourself.
I don’t think any uninformed people should be voting, period. Furthermore, I would prefer a voting formula in which voters were like shareholders. The more taxes you pay, the more weight your vote gets. That way one group can’t vote money away from another group. The people who have earned the money actually have a say in how it’s managed and spent. I would do this for the same reason I won’t allow my unemployed children (when I have them) to plan the family budget. We’d have every X-Box game out there but wouldn’t be able to pay the rent. I’m not interested in having a mini-version of GM as a family.
“Do you really think that if you asked a different set of questions to everyone that voted for McCain that you couldn’t cherrypick some out to make everyone that voted for him look stupid?”
Not in the same numbers, no. For example, if you asked McCain voters what the breakdown was in Congress, I’d bet a suitcase full of money that a HELL of a lot more than 36.5% of them know that both houses of Congress have a Democratic majority. Those questions weren’t cherry picked, either. They were some of the biggest controversies of the election. The point being, the media decided that Sarah Palin’s pregnant daughter was a bigger issue than Obama being a socialist and his VP being a plagiarizing demagogue. I wish they had asked them about Biden discussing FDR’s television fame. The media would have never let a Republican get away with anything close to what they covered up for the Democrats.
I’d like to see Zogby take a random sampling of each candidate’s voters and give a general IQ test. Oh yeah, I forgot. IQ tests are racist.
And most people ended up not caring about the 57 states comment, Joe Biden’s prior attempts at running for President and Bill Ayers. Also, Texas did not go for Obama. I will say that anyone who does think Obama is a Muslim is probably someone that wouldn’t vote for him unless they were actually Muslim.
As for Bush/Cheney linking with Saddam and 9/11, they were still making that claim in 2004, the media had nothing to do with it. Where is the strawman?
Yes, I think there are a lot of uninformed voters on both sides. How many Republicans knew about the Keating Five? How many knew the McCain divorced his upon returning home from Vietnam for the prettier, younger wife? I can’t believe the party that is labeled as “elitist” draws all of the uninformed voters, sorry. 12 of the 15 smartest states are blue while 6 of the 15 “dumbest” were blue.
So you basically want government created classes based on how much money you make?
You want to talk about Biden’s FDR remarks while Sarah Palin couldn’t even explain what the Vice President does. I didn’t see anyone talking about that. Why didn’t we hear about Alaska being the biggest welfare state in the country?
I wouldn’t mind seeing IQ tests done either, I just wouldn’t want John Zogby to be in charge of it. Scotty Rasmussen is a much better pollster than Zogby.
I corrected the typo about Texas. I meant McCain, but the point is that almost half (about 44%) went for Obama. I think just mentioning a statistic like that from Texas can be misleading.
I would like to see a reference for either Bush or Cheney discussing the link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11 in 2004. I know they’ve discovered ties between people here and there, terrorist cells and people hiding in Iraq, etc., etc., but I don’t recall ever hearing either person describe a direct link or conspiracy. The straw man is this fantasy that Bush and Cheney devised a war based on the idea that Saddam had a hand in 9/11. They’ve never made such an assertion, and the decision to go to war with Iraq was based on the intelligience they had access to at the time, which most of your Democratic buddies also saw and made the decision to go to war. So then the media has been trying to burn their straw man for the past 8 years, debunking the never-asserted idea that Saddam was behind 9/11 as proof that Bush was some kind of devious mastermind who perpetrated a huge scam against Congress. Like I’ve mentioned before…they don’t even think he can tie his own shoes, didn’t trust him to nominate a federal judge, but somehow he was able to pull this one over on Congress?
And as for the “smart” and “dumb” states, you’re really cooking the books on that one. So, are you saying, by extension, that in a state like Illinois, that the locations where the heaviest concentrations of Obama supporters are clustered are also the “smartest” areas of the state? That’s too funny. I used to live near Cabrini Green, which is, shall we say “a heavily Democratic leaning community?” I can’t imagine what those geniuses have done to end up living in such a pathetic state. So, in Indiana, I guess the smartest people in the state live in Gary, since that’s where the highest concentration of Obama supporters reside. I’ve been through Gary many times, and to describe it as an intellectual hub of any kind actually made me laugh so hard I peed myself a little while I was writing that. Democrats can’t win your so-called “smart” states without places like Gary, Cabrini, and other vibrant downtown, inner-city areas who vote 99% Democrat.
How is voting based on whether or not you have a stake in government creating classes? People create classes by what they achieve in life, not government. I think you should have more of a say in government when you contribute more money to the government.
If you have never paid taxes of any kind and therefore never contributed to a road, a school, our national defense, etc. why should you be involved in decisions about how to manage those affairs? Can you honestly say that someone who pays $250,000 a year to the government should have the same say in how that money is spent as a homeless person who can’t even read? How can this make sense to a rational person?
How may Republicans know about the Keating 5? If you actually knew the whole story you wouldn’t even bring it up. McCain didn’t do anything wrong. If he had the media would have forced him out of the race. There’s not jack shit in that story. As for divorcing his wife after what he had just been through? If he painted himself blue every day upon waking for 2 years after something like that I would give him a pass. What bearing does that possibly have on his ability to be president? Is that equivalent to the Ayers situation? Someone getting their political start at the home of a domestic terrorist is no more important to than McCain getting a divorce? Am I really having this conversation? Manbaby, you’re giving me a headache =)
Here is the Bush-Cheney reference, looks like both actually said something in the same week. I think people finally started questioning it and that’s why it went away after 3 years of Bush-Cheney making the claim.
http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/06/15/bush.alqaeda/index.html
Palin even used the Iraq-9/11 connection recently.
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/thebeat/359848
In regards to Illinois, Obama won by well over 1 million votes. He won Cook, McHenry, Lake, DuPage and Will Counties which are where 80% of the state lives. Our brightest and wealthiest people reside in these areas. When 12 of the 15 “smartest” states vote for one person, I see that as a trend, no offense to the other states. Manhattan had one of Obama’s largest margins in the country, Manhattan is also home to many highly educated people. Per exit polls, Obama also won across every level of education. His 2 largest margins were amongst those with no high school (4% of the electorate) and those with a postgraduate degree (17% of the electorate).
Doesn’t everyone have a stake in government? I just don’t see the logic in letting the wealthy run the country any more than they already do. What happened to “All men are created equal”? Isn’t that why we declared independence from the British?
McCain was found to have used poor judgment in the Keating Five scandal so he wasn’t completely innocent. I still haven’t seen anything to support that Obama’s career was started in Ayers living room outside of Newsmax or Sean Hannity. The “values voters” (there is a one issue voting block for you) might have had issue with him divorcing his wife because she became disfigured. Just because his 5th plane crash was over Vietnam and he was held as a POW doesn’t mean he gets a pass on all of his actions.
So you give me quotes taken out of context and interpreted by the two Bush/Cheney hating propaganda machines that are CNN and the Nation. OK, I’ll go with it. You have parts of the article blaming Bush for lying about a connection between Al Qaeda and Iraq, then the other part juxtaposing Sarah Palin’s thoughts about Iraq as being in direct opposition from Bush and Cheney’s official statements. In other words, look at how crazy Sarah Palin is…she even disagrees with Bush and Cheney! You truly cannot win this argument with a liberal, because semantics are twisted, quotes are taken out of context, and finding a link between some Al Qaeda terrorist who lives in Iraq, or who may have ties to Iraq, suddenly translates to the Bush administration claiming that Saddam Hussein flew his personal jet into the WTC.
This from the nation article:
“Palin’s assessment directly contradicts that of President Bush and key members of his national security team.”
“Bush acknowledged on September 17, 2003, that, “We have no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with the 11 September attacks.”
Moreover, I think the Nation took her speech way out of context. She talks of the Innocent…I’m assuming innocent iraqis who want to live in peace, free of terrorist organizations who may be offshoots of Al Qaeda in Iraq. She’s talking about Muslim fundamentalists who believe, according to their religion, that non-believers should be conquered and converted or killed. Whether they’re Al Qaeda, an offshoot of Al Qaeda, an organization who trades arms with the original 9/11 Al Qaeda. I really could care less. Saddam Hussein was a mass murderer and I’m glad he’s gone from the face of the earth. The intelligence may have been wrong, but I’m glad that Bush, Clinton, Biden, etc. all voted for the war because I’m pleased with the outcome. We won, and a murderous dictator can’t murder his own people anymore. If only we could have caught Hitler sooner! Who knows how many lives could have been saved. No, people like you sat around with their heads in the sand until the atrocities were too big to ignore. Had we taken Hitler out sooner, you’d still be whining about semantics, about what we knew when, etc. The worst thing that happened under the Bush administration was that a lunatic who murdered and tortured his own people was taken out and now the people of Iraq will be able to live more peaceful lives. God forbid. The United States is the devil.
“Letting” the wealthy run the country? The wealthy are the reason this country has any prosperity at all. They’re the reason that you have a job to go to every day. The wealthy are the reason we’re having this conversation on the internet. The wealthy are the reason we have the freedom to say all this. Before the government became an instrument of deriving wealth from one body of people and transferring it to the parasite class, I could see the argument for giving everyone a vote. Do you honestly believe it is morally right for one group to vote money away from another group? Can you point to one founding document of this country that suppports that line of reasoning? I hate to break it to you, but when they talk about “all men” being “created equal,” they weren’t talking about financial equity. That was Marx and Engels.
If you’re going to support that type of government, then have the balls to come out and say you want to overthrow the Republic and re-establish a socialist or communist form of government. Don’t sit there like a coward and pretend like you have some sort of justification via the “living, breathing constitution” while you’re raping it behind the scenes. Call it what it is. Have the courage. At least our founding fathers did…they knew they were fighting a Revolution and reveled in it. It’s the subversive nature of the whole liberal movement that disgusts me the most.
Oh, and that statistic doesn’t surprise me. You have the echo chamber of the liberal elite of academia (i.e. the Marxists with Ph.D.’s who sit around and theorize about economics vs. those who actually have to run a company) and the poor uneducated class who vote Democrat by the largest margins. I don’t dispute that statistic at all. I have two degrees and though I didn’t fall for the brainwashing, they sure as hell tried.
Are you denying the Obama/Ayers connection? You’ve really had too much kool-aid.
I can bring up the Cheney quote on 25 different websites. Would all of them work for you?
You want to talk about taking out of context? Palin now disagrees with the Bush Administration. Go back a few years and they were still spouting exactly what she was saying, even when others were calling them out on it. It took Bush 2 years to mention that there is no link between Saddam Hussein and those that struck us on 9/11. Cheney was still running with it in 2004. If there was belief that the connection did exist then proof should have been provided. On the other hand, if we are going to nation build, we should probably have an idea of where we are going next since we “won” in Iraq.
My “all men are created equal” line wasn’t in regards to financial equity, it was in regards to everyone having the same right to an equal vote. I really can’t believe you think votes should be distributed by wealth, that’s discrimination. Maybe we should also only allow men to vote again as well as bring back the religious test so them Jews or Catholics can’t vote.
Obama won amongst EVERY group though. Non-high school grads, high school grads, college grads and postgraduates.
When did I ever say there was no Ayers-Obama connection? I don’t really care if there was but I never saw any evidence of this living room fundraiser you brought up.
The more I thought about this and read into this I started wondering why most of those questions are relevant in regards to voting for president. While I do think people should be informed, there were 2 questions out of those 12 that were actually relevant to policy. The remaining questions don’t mean a damn thing when it comes to voting.
The argument was about whether or not Hussein was behind 9/11. Right? Find me a quote from Cheney or Bush that claims that Saddam Hussein was directly linked to the 911 attacks-if you can find 20, then feel free to post all of them. I said it was a straw man and I stand by it.
There are people in that country who are involved in Al Qaeda. I’m sure there are plenty of backroom alliances between various terrorist organizations who have their hatred for the west in common, and Cheney and Bush have discussed those links as they have been uncovered. I am seven degrees away from Kevin Bacon and therefore linked to him, but once again, they have never suggested that Saddam Hussein was behind the 9/11 attacks. That hasn’t stopped the media from “disproving” it for 8 years. That is why I’m not surprised that 65% of Republicans believe it.
You still refuse to address the fact that we couldn’t have gone to war without the support of Democrats. You want to call me out on wanting people who provide more to the public fund to have more of a say in how it’s spent, but you refuse to acknowledge the way our government currently works. BUSH and CHENEY didn’t TAKE US TO WAR. That is an absolutely preposterous, naive, ignorant way of looking at how the government works. They all had access to THE SAME EVIDENCE. If you want to believe in a conspiracy theory that the war was concocted for oil, nation building, or whatever, then you’d better damned well include all of your fine upstanding Democratic Representatives and Senators in the conspiracy as well. You can’t bitch about two people taking us to war when that’s literally impossible under our current form of government.
Let’s make this a real stretch, though. Let’s say Bush and Cheney had access to information that showed that Iraq was no threat. Their “secret” intelligience reports showed that Saddam Hussein was just a peace-loving dictator who liked puppies, cultivating petunias, and listening to Tori Amos. They then had a big important meeting at the White House, where they brought the unsuspecting Democrats into the conference room. Bush had tapped several kegs of Milwaukee’s Best in order to liquor up the Democrats and keep them distracted…no, that’s right. He had Nancy Pelosi do that because he was too dumb to tap a keg. So as they were filing in, Cheney, being the evil mastermind that he is, took the REAL evidence and hid it under the rug. Meanwhile, Bush had made plenty of copies of the FAKE evidence, which he passed out to everyone in attendance. Some of the Democrats said, “Bush, thanks for the beer, but we pretty much can’t vote for war under any circumstance because we’re pacifists. There’s no dispute that can’t be solved without a little bit of dialogue. Saddam won’t let weapons inspectors in like he’s supposed to, but that doesn’t mean he’s hiding anything.” So those Democrats voted no.
The rest of the Democrats, already a little bit tipsy from the beer, looked at their folders and exclaimed, “Bush, we’re behind you all the way! That old Saddam, he really is a bad guy.” Even Bush was amazed. “Cheney, can you beleive they fell for it? All this time they’re accusing me of being the dumbest president EVER, and look what we did!! We fooled them all!!” It was only 8 years later when investigations finally uncovered the REAL evidence under the rug.
Oh wait, that never happened. 8 years later, we know that they all acted on the evidence they had at the time. We had just been attacked by Muslim extremists, and we had a lunatic who liked to slaughter his own people refusing to comply with UN regulations to let weapons inspectors in. So, Bush, Cheney, and let me add this again for clarity’s sake, THE REPUBLICANS AND DEMOCRATS OF CONGRESS took us to war, and we won. So now there are people with eyes who would have had them gauged out. There are children who are alive because they weren’t subjected to chemical attacks like the Kurds were. I can think of presidents who did much worse.
“All men are created equal” doesn’t have anything to do with the right to vote. Our founding fathers didn’t believe everyone should have the right to vote, and it’s not written anywhere in our founding documents either. In fact, try to locate the word “Democracy” in the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. We weren’t intended to be a Democracy. We were supposed to be a Republic, but we have degenerated into a Democracy. The founding fathers HATED the idea of Democracy. Remember, Hitler, who gloated about his own rise to power due to the ignorance of the masses who elected him under a Democratic system, said “how fortunate for leaders that men do not think.”
Jefferson recognized the danger of such a system, stating that “a democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.”
He recognized that, in a Democracy, the wil of the majority trumps individual liberty. If the majority votes to confiscate 80% of your income before you can provide for your family, then that’s ok. If the majority votes that the practice of your particular religion is offensive to the rese of the mob, then they can outlaw it. If the majority votes that the mentally ill are a strain on society and should be eliminated, then they shall be exterminated. Do you see where this is going? Democracy will always degenerate into tyrrany. As long as the rights of the individual, the smallest minority, are subverted, you have tyranny, whether it’s one man making the decisions or a mob.
Our founding fathers went to great lengths in designing the Constitution that we would NOT degenerate into Democracy. People forget that the Second Amendment was put into place so that people could overthrow the government if it became tyrranical, which is why the left tries so hard to take it away. It had nothing whatsoever to do with hunting. It is purely an ignorance of history, thanks to government schools, that has led us here today.
So, you can argue with me, but you really should take a closer look at how we came about as a country. My views may be considered radical, but they brought this country into existence. Like I said, if you want socialism, communism, redistribution of wealth, etc., then you need to make a distinction between what we have now, what our government was intended to be, and what you want us to become.
Don’t try to find justification in our constitution for what you’re doing. Advocate the destruction of our constitution and argue for a new form of government. Revolt! Don’t you dare hide under our Constitution or the Declaration of Independence and claim that what your ideology has done to destroy individual liberty has some sort of constitutional justification. Stand up for what you believe!! Start quoting Karl Marx. Let’s bring it up into the national discussion again. How did millions end up dead from this form of government and how can we prevent it? You don’t think the wealthy can be trusted with the money they’ve earned through their own right, then stand up for that! Obama should have campaigned on that idea, instead of campaigning on being a tax-cutting conservative.
All I’m asking is that you cowardly bastards come out of the closet. Why are you so afraid of talking about it? What almost cost Obama the election? His quote to Joe the Plumber about spreading the wealth around is EXACTLY WHAT HE INTENDS TO DO!!! It wasn’t a gaffe, he didn’t later retract it. It wasn’t taken out of context. Can you believe that in America, the one time that a presidential candidate’s entire campaign was in jeopardy was when his true beliefs “slipped out?” They shut him up after that. Or, how about when Biden talked about how it was time to “be patriotic” by paying higher taxes? They shut him up after that. When the press challenged them on their Marxist ideas, they banned the television station that dared to say anything. If all these Obama supporters are so God Damned smart, then why did he have to campaign as a fraud in order to get elected? Why did he have to keep so quiet about his true intentions. Why did he have to distance himself from Jeremiah Wright? Why did Princeton have to hide Michelle Obama’s thesis until the day after the election? Why did the LA Times have to hide a tape of Obama probably cheering as Muslim radicals discussed their hatred for Israel? At least McCain had the guts to stand up and say that the redistribution of wealth is wrong during a time of economic crisis when everybody was scared and he knew it would probably cost him the election, but you can’t say the same for Obama. No, as soon as it slipped out he had to go run and hide. Had to implement emergency PR Damage Control. He realy would have made Hitler proud.
Manbaby, which of the 2 questions are relevant? And, while I do think more of them are relevant, the point of the survey wasn’t to quiz them on the issues. It was to juxtapose the ridiculous, irrelevant things they did know vs. the things they didn’t.
The coal and spreading the wealth questions were relevant, that’s it. The rest of them don’t matter a bit when it comes to voting for president.
So the point of the questions were to see if the people that voted for Obama memorized Sean Hannity’s talking points?
I also disagree that the Joe the Plumber thing harmed Obama and almost cost him the election, he won quite comfortably. I believe he won a number of states by 10% or more that add up to 259 electoral votes. When you add in the states he won between 5-9% it wasn’t even close.
You’re absolutely right. It didn’t cost him the election because he’s a brilliant politician who paid attention to his PR team and kept his mouth shut about his true socialist agenda for the rest of the campaign. The sheeple were too worried about Sarah Palin’s knocked up daughter and her $150K wardrobe to be bothered with the messy details of the socialist takeover of the United States.
So Ziegler tried to get Zogby to do the same poll of McCain voters this week and was denied by Zogby. Zogby realized what a joke this poll was and decided to retain some credibility so he can get hired for future elections.
“This was not Zogby International’s finest hour,” he said. “Something, somehow, fell through the cracks.” He said he would review the incident with his staff on Friday to determine what went wrong.