The "Republicans Are Crazy" Poll

Poll results like this make me wonder how literally 35% of the population of this country manage to survive throughout the day without sticking a pencil in their eye, walking into an open manhole cover, or getting hit by a speeding train.

●67% of Republicans (and 40 percent of Americans overall) believe that Obama is a socialist.

●57% of Republicans (32 percent overall) believe that Obama is a Muslim

●45% of Republicans (25 percent overall) agree with the Birthers in their belief that Obama was "not born in the United States and so is not eligible to be president"

●38% of Republicans (20 percent overall) say that Obama is "doing many of the things that Hitler did"

●24% of Republicans (14 percent overall) say that Obama "may be the Antichrist."

Muslim? Hitler? ANTICHRIST?! SERIOUSLY?! This is what happens when you become insulated and watch nothing but Fox News and listen to no one but Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck.

Just Like Kudzu

posted by Armadillo Joe

KUDZU: Pueraria lobata (syn. P. montana, P. thunbergiana) is one of about 20 species in the genus Pueraria in the pea family Fabaceae, subfamily Faboideae. It is a climbing, coiling, and trailing vine native to southern Japan and southeast China.

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Kudzu was introduced from Japan into the United States in 1876 at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, where it was promoted as a forage crop and an ornamental plant.

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It was subsequently discovered that the Southeastern US has near-perfect conditions for kudzu to grow out of control — hot, humid summers, frequent rainfall, temperate winters with few hard freezes [...] and no natural predators.

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kudzu has been spreading in the southern U.S. at the rate of 150,000 acres (61,000 ha) annually, "easily outpacing the use of herbicide spraying and mowing, as well increasing the costs of these controls by $6 million annually." Its introduction has produced devastating environmental consequences.

Rick Pearlstein at the Washington Post online -- whose book on Goldwater I just finished and whose other book on Nixon I am currently reading -- puts this whole birther/deather/town-hell thing into perspective. But not in a way you might find encouraging:

...the birthers, the anti-tax tea-partiers, the town hall hecklers -- these are "either" the genuine grass roots or evil conspirators staging scenes for YouTube? The quiver on the lips of the man pushing the wheelchair, the crazed risk of carrying a pistol around a president -- too heartfelt to be an act. The lockstep strangeness of the mad lies on the protesters' signs -- too uniform to be spontaneous. They are both. If you don't understand that any moment of genuine political change always produces both, you can't understand America, where the crazy tree blooms in every moment of liberal ascendancy, and where elites exploit the crazy for their own narrow interests.

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The instigation is always the familiar litany: expansion of the commonweal to empower new communities, accommodation to internationalism, the heightened influence of cosmopolitans and the persecution complex of conservatives who can't stand losing an argument.

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The various elements -- the liberal earnestly confused when rational dialogue won't hold sway; the anti-liberal rage at a world self-evidently out of joint; and, most of all, their mutual incomprehension -- sound as fresh as yesterday's news.

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The orchestration of incivility happens, too, and it is evil. Liberal power of all sorts induces an organic and crazy-making panic in a considerable number of Americans, while people with no particular susceptibility to existential terror -- powerful elites -- find reason to stoke and exploit that fear. And even the most ideologically fair-minded national media will always be agents of cosmopolitanism: something provincials fear as an outside elite intent on forcing different values down their throats.

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The tree of crazy is an ever-present aspect of America's flora. Only now, it's being watered by misguided he-said-she-said reporting and taking over the forest

Really, go read the whole thing. It's worth it.