More Birther Crazie

Check this portrait of teh crazie from Public Policy Polling.

After looking at the results I have to ask, What the heck happened to the GOP? It used to be a party of ideas. Granted, few of those ideas I agreed with but at least William F. Buckley knew BS when he saw it. He wrote about the Birchers' "paranoid and unpatriotic drivel" way back in 1965.

There were level headed adults in the GOP back then, it seems.

Not so much these days. PPP interviewed 400 Republican Primary voters and found that when asked this question:

Do you think Barack Obama was born in the United States?

Only 28% said yes. 51% said no and 21% were not sure.

Think of that for a minute. A well documented historical event, (meaning there's official paper work to support the report) and 72% of Republican primary voters don't accept its validity.

Bertrand Russell wrote about how to rate the appropriate level skepticism for historical events his solution was to imagine what would unknown stuff would have to be right in order for a well documented event to be false. He didn't use this example, but try to imagine what would have to be true in order for this statement "Abraham Lincoln was shot in Ford's Theatre in April of 1865." to be false. Once you do that, reality is easy to accept.

Think of what conspiracy has to be in place in order for the statement "Barack Obama was born in Hawaii in 1961." in order to be false. That's what that majority of GOPers must believe.

What happened to the GOP?

One last thing. If you're sitting at a table where there are 4 Republicans who say they'll be voting in their state's upcoming primary, there's a good chance that 2 of them are out-right birthers and another is too clueless to know better.

What happened to the GOP?