Above are the results of a poll conducted by Research 2000 on behalf of the liberal blog DailyKos. It outlines the current opinions of those who are self-described Republicans. For those who have been paying attention to the nearly pornographic display of self-assured stupidity that accounts for political discourse from the so-called real Americans, the above results are expected.
The Economist magazine attempts to decompress the numbers as it relates to the American population at large. While Bruce Bartlett, former George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan official, charges that "between 20% and 50% of the party is either insane or mind-numbingly stupid." He further notes, that he does not consider himself to be a standing member of the lunatic fringe party. A position that he expounded in his 2006 book "Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy."
What should be noted, is that affiliation to the Republican party is at historic lows, with recent polls placing popular support between 21-24%. With moderate conservatives fleeing the party in the aftermath of the disastrous Bush years and the proliferation of anti-establishment factions, like the tea baggers and right-wing militia movements, the Republican base has been reduced to the cultists and Southerners. It is not surprising then that these people, being not the most educated, socially mobile, or economically viable, would have regressive and anti-modernist views. However, to believe that Obama is a socialist, Caribou Barbie (aka Sarah Palin) is more competent to run the nation, and that homosexuals should be purged from public schools, takes a level of ignorance that one would typically find amongst the illiterate citizens of third world banana republics.
The tragedy really is that only the tiniest fraction of voters seem to have a clue as to how close to bankruptcy the government really is.
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