This is how fucked up the media is. I watched five minutes of the John King show on CNN about the poll saying 1 in 5 people think Obama's a Muslim. John King asked, "Is this a problem for Obama?" Paul Begala answered, "This is because of right wing networks like Fox." The other guest, a Republican strategist of some kind, said, "People didn't really know who they were voting for when they voted for Obama."
Begala's wrong. The problem isn't Fox - though Fox News is detestable. The problem is networks like CNN that pick up this story and report it like it's legitimate news. And the strategist saying, "People didn't know..." implies that the 20% who believe Obama is a Muslim are people who voted for him. They're not - they're the right wing base, the dead-enders who supported Bush till the last moment, the 20% who think Sarah Palin's an intellectual.
I'm sure if you polled people, a lot of people think Obama's a reptilian. 20% think we should bomb Iran to start the war of Armageddon. 20% think Sammy Hagar's better than David Lee Roth. The moral: people believe a lot of stupid shit. Vast, distressing numbers, but they're still in the minority.
The worse moral, though, is that the media is picking up a story about the minority and talking about it as if it's believed by the majority. So it's not 20% anymore, it's "people believe," until it becomes lost that it's a minority opinion, and other people start to think, "Hey, maybe he is a Muslim." This is what happens on the "less biased" networks like CNN. Fox already reaches the dead-enders. CNN legitimizes their propaganda.
The real question is what percentage of people who voted for Obama think he's a Muslim. Smaller. Now, the percentage of those voters who think that's a problem. Even smaller. The implication is not just that Obama's a Muslim, but if he is, that must be bad. As a result, you get things like the mosque controversy.
And you get appearances like this, where a nutcake is able to pontificate about his insidious beliefs:
I think the president's problem is that he was born a Muslim. His father was a Muslim. The seed of Islam is passed through the father like the seed of Judaism is passed through the mother. He was born a Muslim. His father gave him an Islamic name. Now it's obvious that the president has renounced the Prophet Muhammad and he has renounced Islam and he has accepted Jesus Christ.
This is not reasonable, intellectual discussion about religion - it's lighter fluid on the bonfire of stupidity. The question shouldn't be "Is this a problem for Obama?" it should be "Why are people so fucking stupid?" But then they'd have to point the finger back at themselves.
Cross-posted somewhere else.