Jun 21st, 2009 at 8:36 am
Birther Support Hovering Around 8 Percent
WorldNetDaily has been trying to hype up poll results that allegedly show a majority of the public shares their conspiracy theory doubts about the location of Barack Obama’s birth. Dave Weigel takes a closer look and finds that the real number of Americans “troubled” by these rumors is more like 7.8 percent.
Of course the genius and the tragedy of America is that in such a large country as ours, that adds up to tens of millions of people! And if you look at the popularity of UFO conspiracy theories and other things, you can probably assume that this sizable fringe will always be with us.
41 Responses to “Birther Support Hovering Around 8 Percent”
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June 21st, 2009 at 8:46 am
I believe the rate of people with crippling mental problems in the country is around 3%. So, that leaves 5% who are simply political tools.
June 21st, 2009 at 8:51 am
Honestly, and with all due respect, is this even worth dignifying by discussion, Matt?
June 21st, 2009 at 8:55 am
I would be willing to bet big money that the percent of the population that believes in astrology and UFOs and disbelieves in the theory of evolution greatly exceeds the fraction that accepts the birfers’ crap. I doubt that Mr. Farah over at Worldnutdaily really believes this; it’s just a profitable method of attracting the gullible to his web site. The birfers will begin to have some credibility when they produce a Kenyan birth certificate for President Osama.
June 21st, 2009 at 8:57 am
It’s a good thing we have people like you and Dave Weigel to “take a closer look” at and debunk poll numbers regarding “birther support”. Because otherwise, if such a poll went undebunked…..well, wait. Nothing would happen.
June 21st, 2009 at 9:08 am
Fascinating that Matt utterly ignores the widespread 9/11 “Truther” conspiracy nutters on the left. Maybe it’s just too embarrassing.
June 21st, 2009 at 9:18 am
Yep Sonic its not like there are stting congressmen leading this charge or anything…
Umm James, are you really that stupid? My guess is Matt will agree that 9/11 truthers are also a very small minority of people.
June 21st, 2009 at 9:24 am
Re James Robertson
Unfortunately, the troofers are not confined to the political left, anymore then the antivaxers are. On the other hand, the birfers are also not confined to the political right, as evidenced by Democrat Philip Berg who has filed a number of fatuous lawsuits in federal courts. Oddly enough, right wing nutcase Farah and left wing nutcase Berg are very much in bed together on the birfer front.
June 21st, 2009 at 9:29 am
Fascinating that Matt utterly ignores the widespread 9/11 “Truther” conspiracy nutters on the left.
Of course real Truthers are neither widespread on “the left” nor exclusively on the left (there are right-wing Truthers, mostly people who include 9/11 on a long list of events caused by Jewish conspiracies).
Maybe James misrepresents the facts about the Truthers because it’s just too embarrassing.
June 21st, 2009 at 9:33 am
Fascinating that Matt utterly ignores the widespread 9/11 “Truther” conspiracy nutters on the left. Maybe it’s just too embarrassing.
Anecdotally speaking, I’ve gotten e-mail forwards and been spoken to about “birther” theories by my right wing relatives while I, a liberal activist through-and-through, never had my friends and activist/volunteer colleagues explain to me that “9/11 was an inside job.”
June 21st, 2009 at 9:48 am
“Honestly, and with all due respect, is this even worth dignifying by discussion, Matt?”
I believe Matthew is making a roundabout argument for the proposition that Barack Obama has no birth certificate because he arrived on Earth in a UFO.
Given that this is a relatively original allegation, I think it’s a valuable addition to the discourse.
June 21st, 2009 at 10:03 am
It’s the 17% rule. Give people a question with two possible answers and at least 17% will say each, even if one of the answers is obviously wrong. If people are afraid that the answer will make them look bad, only about half of them will remain, and if they think it will make them look good, it will get 50% more. A poll that has an answer that gained no more than what the 17% rule predicts is essentially unanimous. If the second answer were to garner less than the rule would predict (say in a Cuban election), then the poll is faulty.
June 21st, 2009 at 10:04 am
I believe Matthew is making a roundabout argument for the proposition that Barack Obama has no birth certificate because he arrived on Earth in a UFO.
Given that this is a relatively original allegation, I think it’s a valuable addition to the discourse.
Hardly original. It’s just another case of CAP carrying water for the Obama message machine.
June 21st, 2009 at 10:09 am
Given that this is a relatively original allegation, I think it’s a valuable addition to the discourse.
The ‘assembled from the limbs of cadavers by Bill Ayers’ allegation deserves more circulation, too.
But this post is really just Wacko-baiting, which we could all do without.
June 21st, 2009 at 10:11 am
Of course Obama was not born in Hawaii. He is a Uraniran after all.
June 21st, 2009 at 10:18 am
“The ‘assembled from the limbs of cadavers by Bill Ayers’ allegation deserves more circulation, too.”
Huh. I follow current events rather closely, and I was completely unaware that this was the case.
Your ideas are intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
June 21st, 2009 at 10:35 am
This video of John Hodgman with Obama is solidly entertaining: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yW7OPByRGDY
. . . And relevant, because it has Obama cracking up over a birther joke a few minutes in.
June 21st, 2009 at 11:52 am
You mean Vulcan, of course. We even have photographic evidence of this.
June 21st, 2009 at 11:52 am
Since someone mentioned 9/11 truthers — the guy leading the birth certificate charge, Phillip Berg, is a fulltime 9/11 was an inside job proponent. He’s launched multiple lawsuits against the federal government to that effect. Similarly Glenn Beck’s buddy Alex Jones, he of the FEMA concentration camp/one-world government wing of the nutcase community, is also a very vocal 9/11 truther. When you get that far to the fringe, traditional left/right labels often break down. Some people just like conspiracies in general.
June 21st, 2009 at 12:19 pm
No reason to be polite about what we all know to be true. Let’s face it: 9/11 truthers, birthers, Jew haters, gold standard fetishists, and Paultards are all cut from the same cloth. These are creatures of the right wing. James von Brunn, for example, was a truther, birther, Paultardian Jew hater, and probably a goldbug as well. Claiming that truthers are liberals, as James Robertson does here, is a sign of an otherwise reasonable conservative in deep denial about the habits of his own movement.
TL;DR: Fucking nutjobs tend to be right-wingers, not liberals.
June 21st, 2009 at 12:26 pm
I am not sure of the name of he study about americans and science fact but amongst its findings were that a large percentage of american adults (perhaps %20+) believe that the sun revolves around the earth. The poll was of adults living in the US in 20th century not native americans living in the pre-columbian period. Back when I took briefly experimented with hallucinogens I believed that Mt. Shasta was one of the 7 major energy points on the planet and was regularly visited by aliens in U.F.O.s.
June 21st, 2009 at 12:33 pm
Fine, Birfers aren’t a terribly important political force, and birferism isn’t a terribly important belief system. Still, it’s an interesting cultural phenomenon-slash-freakshow.
James Robertson Says:
June 21st, 2009 at 9:08 am
Fascinating that Matt utterly ignores the widespread 9/11 “Truther” conspiracy nutters on the left. Maybe it’s just too embarrassing.
Most of the Troofers I’ve seen were right-leaning libertarians.
June 21st, 2009 at 12:35 pm
Funny how just a few years ago the GOP was pushing to allow naturalized citizens NOT born in the USA to become president (simply to allow Gov Terminator from CA to run for prez) … but once again, when they are faced with a Democratic popular president, they switch gears and now demand printed original birth certificates!
June 21st, 2009 at 12:56 pm
Yep Sonic its not like there are stting congressmen leading this charge or anything…
“leading this charge” meaning what? Still nothing’s gonna happen either way.
June 21st, 2009 at 1:30 pm
Robertson if you dig into it very deeply I think you’ll be disappointed to learn that there is a lot of overlap between Birthers, 9-11 truthers and Ron Paul supporters. They probably also have a fair amount of John Birch society memberships Larouch followers, people worried about the Tri-lateral commision and general conspiracy theory nuts.
I think the left-right labels don’t even really apply to that fringe, they are off in a special world all their own.
June 21st, 2009 at 2:08 pm
Re: birfers
Careful with the creative misspellings, SLC. One doesn’t want to give Yglesias and other orthographically challenged hipsters more ideas on how to bastardize the storied tongue of Shakespeare, Milton, Blake and Spurgeon.
June 21st, 2009 at 3:24 pm
Spurgeon? I’m now fully on board with the claim that you write for Fafblog.
June 21st, 2009 at 3:58 pm
In other news, fewer people lack health care than those who believe Obama is not a native born.
June 21st, 2009 at 4:20 pm
How many phone calls have you the reader made today? Most likely at least one and for some people they’ve probably made several. Making a phone call is easy, right?
Yet, Weigel refuses to make a phone call that could clear all this up.
Weigel’s obsession continues! In less than the time it took him to write the linked post, he could have called Hawaii, asked them the questions that would put this to rest, and written up their response.
Weigel and other hacks have continually refused to do something as simple as picking up the phone and asking some questions. Or, maybe Weigel has and he just doesn’t want to reveal that what HI said shows he’s been misleading people about this issue.
June 21st, 2009 at 5:16 pm
Oh…in that case, please, go on.
June 21st, 2009 at 5:20 pm
Petey:
I believe Matthew is making a roundabout argument for the proposition that Barack Obama has no birth certificate because he arrived on Earth in a UFO.
Given that this is a relatively original allegation, I think it’s a valuable addition to the discourse.
Good one, I lol’d.
June 21st, 2009 at 5:55 pm
[scans thread] What, no mention that Armstrong and Aldrin helped fake the moon landing, which obviously took place on a soundstage in either Burbank or Universal City, I can’t remember which one.
Actual conversation:
Me: There was over 30,000 people that worked on the moon landings, you seriously are going to claim that not ONE of those people would spill the beans to make some cash from a TV show or book?
Him: Anyone that tried to speak up was murdered.
I sometimes wish I had that mindset, it would make dealing with this complex world so much easier.
June 21st, 2009 at 8:32 pm
Tomemos,
I was quoting something I had seen written somewhere about the need not to bastardize the English language- I wasn’t aware who Spurgeon was. I looked him up and find I cannot endorse him. So please ignore the reference to Spurgeon above.
The point stands though that I think this ‘descriptivist’ fad of approaching language is doing grave damage to the tongue of Milton, Chaucer, Donne, and Herbert.
June 21st, 2009 at 9:22 pm
Uh, yeah, Weigel’s obsession.
June 22nd, 2009 at 12:34 am
I can never figure out if we were supposed to freeze English in amber right before, or right after, Shakespeare got done playing around with it.
June 22nd, 2009 at 1:54 am
What DTM said. Or, to put it another way: how in the world could you think that Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Blake were all speaking the “same language” with the same prescriptive rules?
You couldn’t. Ergo, Fafblog!
June 22nd, 2009 at 5:36 am
I was quoting something I had seen written somewhere about the need not to bastardize the English language- I wasn’t aware who Spurgeon was. I looked him up and find I cannot endorse him. So please ignore the reference to Spurgeon above.
See, this is why I love Hector. Sometimes, like in the thread about communism and economic growth, he’ll provide some pretty useful insights. Then he’ll go and write shit like this.
June 22nd, 2009 at 6:46 am
TL;DR: Fucking nutjobs tend to be right-wingers, not liberals.
I don’t know about this. I’ve met some left-wing 9/11 truthers. My exceptions don’t make a rule any more than yours do, but still, there are nutjobs on both sides.
It’s funny, in other contexts I’m quick to argue the other way. When the subject is domestic terrorism, I always try to point out that it’s either moronic or dishonest when right-wingers or their apologists claim that there is a left-wing equivalent to McVeigh or Van Brunn or Roeder and Operation Rescue. There isn’t. But that doesn’t mean crazy people on the left don’t exist, it just means that they don’t feel the same freedom and need to act. It’s entirely possible that some truthers are left-wing nuts.
June 22nd, 2009 at 10:25 am
35% of Democrats are 9/11 Truthers:
June 22nd, 2009 at 10:30 am
That poll showing that 35% of Democrats are 9/11 Truthers is consistent with the other polling, BTW. Zogby found that 42% of Democrats are truthers.
The polling shows that 9/11 Trutherism is a mainstream Democratic position.
June 22nd, 2009 at 10:51 am
Al,
As someone who definitely leans towards the liberal end the truthers are embarrassing. I do think bush let it happen unintentionally due to incompetence and arrogance. So I don’t know if the poll would distinguish between me and a truther or not. I’d believe it even if it didn’t though.
Do you know of any elected officials who are truthers? I would like to know who they are. Especially if they are democrats. I don’t want to have too little embarrassment.
The “left” embarrasses me with the anti-vax stuff as well. I think it is shameful but at least the left doesn’t think I and people like me cause all of the problems with the world.
June 22nd, 2009 at 10:59 am
Of course people like Al (and real Truthers seeking to make it seem like they aren’t fringe whackos) use overinclusive definitions to pad the numbers.
For example, the question in the Rasmussen poll is simply: “Did Bush Know About the 9/11 Attacks in Advance?”
Now it is entirely possible a person could interpret that question to include something as basic as the fact that Bush received a memo entitled “Bin Laden determined to attack inside the U.S.” before 9/11. So, we have no idea how many of those people are real Truthers.
Of course the Zogby poll was commissioned by the Truthers for the express purpose of plumping their apparent numbers and it lays out the question in a way specifically designed to capture as many possible people in the “let it happen” category, and as few in the “official story” category, as it can.
Hence, in the Zogby poll the real Truthers are best measured by the “made it happen” category alone. And here is the breakdown by ideology (percentage in each category selecting “made it happen”):
Progressive 1.7%
Liberal 5.0%
Moderate 5.7%
Conservative 4.1%
Very Conservative 1.0%
Libertarian 11.6%
Not exactly a compelling case that real Truthers are exclusively on the left.