It’s Official: 52% of Republicans Are Unbelievable Morons
Why? Because 52%, according to a recent poll, think that ACORN stole the election for Obama. ACORN, of course, is the right wing’s favorite new smear target.
The thing is, even if you do believe that ACORN is so corrupt that its goal is to steal elections, and so effective that it is successful at it, believing that it stole the election for Obama is so ludicrously insane as to be beyond imagination–which I will mathematically prove below.
In 2000, all it took to steal the election for Bush was a few hundred votes–and there is documented proof that Katherine Harris alone did that, by generating that intentionally fake “felon’s list” which wound up disenfranchising thousands of legitimate Democrats. Add the thousands more Republicans from Seminole and other counties who should have been disqualified but were allowed to vote by illegal means, and you’re way over the top.
But in 2008? Obama won by nine and a half million votes, and by 192 electoral votes, 365 to 173. That means ACORN would have to have stolen at least 87 electoral votes for Obama to win, assuming that in a fair vote, McCain would have won by the slimmest of margins while losing the popular vote by a few million.
If you take the states where Obama won by the fewest number of votes and assume that only the barest number necessary to put Obama over the top were stolen, that would still require ACORN to have stolen at least 935,000 votes in 14 states–and that’s assuming that the people at ACORN were criminal masterminds of unbelievable precision, knowing exactly where to steal just the right number of votes to tip the scales. (Additionally, since ACORN only operated in 21 states, it is unlikely that they were active in the 14 necessary to achieve theft by the smallest number of stolen votes.) Assuming less miraculous precision, one would have to assume that ACORN stole anywhere on the order of four or five million votes.
In the 2008 election season, however, ACORN collected a total of 1.3 million registration forms–and rejected 400,000 as incomplete or fraudulent. Which means that only 900,000 people were registered by ACORN for the election, only half of those being new voters (the other half were address changes).
Which means that even if you assume that every single last registration that ACORN filed represented a stolen vote, then you’re still 35,000 votes short of stealing the election, even with the criminal-mastermind precision.
Which is where we get the “unbelievable morons” part. But you don’t have to crunch the numbers like I did to figure that out–fact is, the idea that ACORN stole the 2008 elections is ludicrous on its very face. More than that, it is literally mathematically impossible.
What’s even more amazing to me than the fact that 52% of Republicans believing that ACORN stole the elections is that 9% of Democrats also believe that, which makes them even more unbelievable morons, albeit in a non-partisan fashion. In addition to 52% of Republicans believing that ACORN stole the election, 21% of Republicans weren’t sure–meaning that 73% of Republicans thought that it might have been possible, and only 23% reject the idea outright.
ACORN has simply become the scapegoat mechanism which is now being blamed for any loss by Republicans; unsurprisingly, Conservative candidate from NY-23, Doug Hoffman, is claiming that the only reason he lost is because ACORN “schem[ed] behind closed doors, twist[ed] arms and st[ole the] election.” He also blamed unions, but ACORN was the alleged mastermind.
Expect more of this: if a right-winger loses, that must mean that ACORN stole the vote. No matter that there is zero documented evidence, no matter that it is mathematically impossible. If a Republican lost, it simply couldn’t have happened that way honestly, so the only possible explanation is that liberals stole it, and ACORN is the scapegoat of the hour.
And their party faithful are just the unbelievable morons to buy it.
Maybe their not morons; just idiots.
70-80 Borderline deficiency
50-69 Moron
20-49 Imbecile
0-19 Idiot
+
“Perspective is worth 80 IQ points.” — Alan Kay.
=
It’s not that they’re stoopid per se, it’s that their ideology is making them stupid.
We’ve gone beyond the factual and into simple fantasyland thinking and argumentation. Around 30% of this country is simply ~~~~ in the head.
http://kfmonkey.blogspot.com/2005/10/lunch-discussions-145-crazification.html
The day after the Rodney King riots in LA I went down to get my passport. This was conincedental, since I had been planning to head off to Japan for weeks if not months, but certainly fitting. Hopefully I will be able to get back again before too long.
I don’t believe these 52 percent of Republicans are morons. I think they don’t trust ACORN to not improperly resister people to vote, which is a crime, I believe. I think they’re saying this allegedly criminal organization unfairly gave the Obama camp some votes. Did it affect the election outcome. No. If however, their activities gave a Democratic Senator a seat that otherwise wouldn’t have been won, it matters. Of course, I don’t know if that happened, so I won’t speculate. That said, depending on the polling technique/questions (“Do you believe illegitimate ACORN ballots increased Obama’s standing in the election?” versus “Did ACORN steal the election for Obama”), the results of two polls theoretically asking the same question can be dramatically different.
But, it’s really irrelevant whether or not ACORN had enough illicit registration forms to throw the election. What matters is whether or not they in their efforts to register voters were deliberately registering illegal voters–in which case those responsible should be prosecuted. In contrast, I don’t believe MS Harris acted illegally. You might disagree with her decision, but that doesn’t make it illegal…so it’s not the same thing and irrelevant to the activities of ACORN.
Cheers…
This is a characterization which I left out of the post intentionally, as a way of giving maximum leeway to the absurd claim. But it is just as absurd.
How, exactly, does ACORN “steal” any votes at all? The main criticisms against ACORN deal not with votes, but with registration–that many of the forms submitted are fraudulent. This is pretty much always due to the same problem every voter registration service suffers from: workers paid by registration filled out. Pay by the hour, and people don’t work hard to register people; pay by the form, and workers will start doing dishonest things to get the forms filled out. None of that is to cast illegal votes. That ACORN’s submissions have more phony registrations cast doubt on its hiring and employment practices–though, to be fair to ACORN, they catch most of the phonies, but have to submit all of them anyway by law. But ACORN tags them as probably fraudulent–and did so for 400,000 of the 1,300,000 they gathered in 2008. Of course, when you see the news stories about how many phony registrations were submitted, like the infamous CNN hit piece which made ACORN look like a massive criminal organization, they somehow fail to mention that ACORN itself tagged the phonies as phonies. It makes for juicier reporting that way.
There is little if any evidence that any more than a tiny number of these false registrations ever results in an actual stolen vote. There is a huge difference between a fraudulent registration and a fraudulent vote. But that’s how it’s being characterized: every time there’s a story about how phony registrations were found, it is reported as “stolen votes.” Not only is the motivation for the phony registrations well accounted for, but the evidence for any actual stolen votes is virtually non-existent. Stealing a vote would require a far different level of fraud, and if it happened even a tenth as much as right-wingers are charging it does, it would result in a large number of people being caught doing it. That doesn’t happen. And it doesn’t happen because ACORN doesn’t steal votes.
However, it is a very convenient lie for the right wing to forward: it allows them to attack and cast doubt on their opponents while at the same time giving them a weapon to dismantle an organization that helps register hundreds of thousands of poor people–people who more often vote for Democrats.
I love how Mark above casually dismisses the Florida voter purge under Harris as just something reasonable people can disagree about.
There is simply no reaching these evil/stupid people. It’s difficult to know which category people like Mark above really are without detailed forensics. ~30% are clearly deluded — can’t find their ass with a map — but 10%-20% of this country should probably vote Republican if their sphere of interest doesn’t extend beyond their me-centered selves — the got-mine-fuck-you contingent. I’ll allow another 10% or so principled few who for some reason believe limited government is the best approach (even though this libertopia has never existed and never really can), but that still doesn’t cover their apologia for the present pathetic state of Republicanism in the US.
Sorry, but you are 100%, absolutely wrong on this one. (You beat me to this one, Troy!)
Not only was the hiring of the firm shady, but there were a great number of irregularities. Then-Governor Bush’s administration in Texas was allowed to slip in 8000 names which later turned out to be bogus. Not only were those identified as felons scrubbed, but anyone who had the same first/last name, gender, and birthdate. But middle names and jr/sr differences were ignored, first and last names could be reversed, and the accuracy of matches was, at Harris’ request, lowered to 80%. Social Security numbers, address histories, and database matches–all requires by other states for a confirmed match–were ignored by Harris. Checks on the list were so disregarded that more than 300 were listed as committing crimes in the future, and thousands more had no date of conviction or other pertinent data. The error rate of the list was about 15% or higher, far beyond the 1 or 2% error rate mandated by other states. One county (Tallahassee) found as high as a 95% rate of people inaccurately identified as felons–and they were the only county that check every person on the list carefully. 88% removed from rolls were black, despite only 46% of Florida felons being black. A vast majority on the list were Democrats.
Even the firm putting the list together, despite playing fast and loose in several ways, wanted to have much stricter standards to lower the mismatch rate–but Harris refused, saying such checks weren’t needed. Harris had to know very well that the people she was robbing of voting rights were predominantly Democrats.
One can use all kinds of apologist acrobatics to claim that Harris was not knowingly committing vote fraud, but when it comes down to it, you simply cannot deny that level of complicity. The fact that she knowingly approved of unacceptable accuracy rates and actively refused to allow for checking are enough by themselves.
Legally? Legally, a senator can be on the record as disapproving of something and intending to vote against it one day, the next day receive a $100,000 donation from a corporation that wants the law approved, and the day after that do a 180-degree turn and suddenly approve of it–and be 100% guaranteed that he would never be investigated for bribery unless he actually said out loud that there was a quid pro quo. So one should not be surprised that Harris has not been convicted.
As for ACORN: not only were the fraudulent registrations committed by the workers on the street, but ACORN itself was the agency that caught the vast majority of the cheats. If you watch that CNN report where the county office workers claim to have found 50% of the ACORN registrations to be false, they were lying: ACORN tagged them as such. Those officials then stood in front of CNN’s cameras and claimed that they had found ACORN to be guilty of submitting fraudulent forms, when (a) ACORN had tagged them and (b) the law requires that ACORN submit them even if they believed them to be false and tagged them as such.
Harris knowingly skewed the felons list to disenfranchise Democratic voters; ACORN tried to catch all the false registrations and stop bad ones from getting through. So to say that Harris’ actions “aren’t the same thing” as what ACORN did, that much is correct–except you’ve got it backwards as to whom was breaking the law.
One more time on free contracts.
The United States is based upon one principle: Free Contract.
That’s it.
Under such a system, bargaining power is everything.
Everything that goes on around us has to do with individuals or groups of individuals trying to obtain ever greater bargaining power: from personal grooming, to advertising, to politics in Washington.
It’s all about bargaining power.
Rich people know this in their bones. It’s why they are rich.
They focus on accruing bargaining power almost exclusively.
This is why the moneyed classes hate unions.
This is why the Republicans attack ACORN.
ACORN is simply an organization of church ladies that are attempting to help poor people gain and make use of all the latent bargaining power that’s legally available to them in our society and which they typically don’t take advantage of.
Here me now and seem me later. Rich conservatives know what this is all about. Their cousins, Rich liberals, set this up to chip away at the rich’s bargaining power.
Their couldn’t be a weaker group of people that the church ladies could try to help, yet the conservatives go after them worse than they go after almost anything else.
Any person who attacks ACORN and is not a billionaire or near billionaire is a stooge for the uber-wealthy and being played as a chump by the rich.
And for the record, there is no record of ACORN ever steeling any votes – the only claim is that some of the street people they hire to register street people, filed some made up forms. In almost every case, ACORN is the agency that found this out and reported it to the authorities.
Meanwhile what Harris did in Florida is criminal. Not only did she play a pivital part in denying democracy, that denial has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people – they’ll be waiting for Miss Harris on the other side – and the implementation of insane public policy that has shortened the American century by about 40 years, and nearly brought global civilization to the abyss.
Not a bad day’s work for an evil flunky. America might not survive her handy work.
Not a bad day’s work for an evil flunky. America might not survive her handy work.
And who was Bush’s campaign manager in Florida? LOL.
For the uttter destruction to America the Republicans accomplished 2001-2006 you’d think they’d be forever shamed to even attempt to show their idiot faces in public any more, not until they discover what the hell they did wrong and promise not to do it again.
But they know that the US is a nation of uneducated/ignorant idiots and with enough bullshit they can perhaps win that 50% +1 they need to regain control of the levers of power. No need for honesty here.
I had an “oh crap” moment when McCain announced Palin — I knew she could represent and motivate the idiot contingent of our country, those wrapped up in the mixed mythologies of American Exceptionalism, Prosperity Theology, and Old Testament for Thee and not for Me judgmentalism. They’re about 20% of the country and serve as very useful idiots in the Lenin sense, and were enough to put the previous Bush into power in Texas and make the election close enough to steal in 2000.
The thinking among the religious right of the time was that God had put Bush into power. Now, they’re all “Bush Who?”. I’d say cognitive dissonance but that requires actual thought processes.