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A chart that cleverly demonstrates how many hours of daylight there are throughout the year at any latitude. Apparently it gets dark early in those tropical paradises.
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51% of Republicans believe that President Obama is not legally qualified to be president because he's not American. (Read as: He's not white.) Morons and racists, every one of them.
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It's a CRIME in Virginia to violate the copyright of the International Olympic Committee. And by "violate the copyright of," I mean use the word "olympiad" to promote any competition. The IOC doesn't even have to file a lawsuit—the state will act on their behalf. It's either a first class misdemeanor or a sixth class felony, depending on the nature of the infringement.
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Anyone who thinks Obama isn’t American is a moron.
Anyone who thinks that the only reason they think he’s not American is that he’s not white is a fucking moron.
There is more than race you know. Granted, there are some racists, and they’re fools and shouldn’t be taken seriously. But many of the Birfers have other objections.
I wonder what percentage of Democrats believed, at the end of November 2001, that the election of George W. Bush was illegitimate because they thought the Supreme Court had “given” the election to him?
Though I suspect that would be interesting to know, Janus, there’s a marked difference there. Intelligent minds may disagree on the topic of whether George Bush had rightly won the presidency, as of the end of November 2001—the ballots were still being counted, Bush’s lawsuit to stop the counting was still under consideration, and the Supreme Court had not yet heard the case, and therefore obviously not yet issued their (split) ruling. On the other hand, intelligent minds may not disagree as to whether Barack Obama was born in the United States, as there is ample evidence that he was, and zero evidence that he was not.
I believe there are also a significant percentage of people who are aware that he was born in Hawaii, but believe that Hawaii is not part of the United States!
… and still everyone continues to overlook the fact that John McCain was born in Panama:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_mccain#Formative_years_and_education
Janus, Janus, Janus.
All good Americans know that the United States Supreme Court crowned George Walker Bush, President of the United States of America on December 12, 2000. It is history!
So in answer to your question, I believe all Democratic voters knew that George Bush was an illegitimate President long before Republican voters reached the same conclusion.
@waldo – I think your analysis would make sense as of Nov 2000, but I picked Nov *2001* intentionally for two reasons: a) it’s roughly the same length of time after GWB’s election as the present-time one year after BHO’s, and b) it was after the announcement of results of the NORC media consortium’s “recount” effort showing that the Supreme Court ruling did not change the outcome (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_election_recount).
Nevertheless, we regularly hear to this day that the Supreme Court “stole” the election.
My broader point, which I hoped for readers to arrive at themselves, is this: what we see today is no different than what we’ve seen since 2000. A divisive president strongly violates the values of a particular group, and the group seeks refuge in a set of “facts” that prove the offensive president to be “illegitimate”. I don’t claim that either group is correct or rational in doing so, but I observe that the behavior (cognitive dissonance) is apparently human nature on both ends of the political spectrum. Not confined to Republican “morons and racists”.
Well said, Janus.
But Janus — as Waldo pointed out, one groups claims were factually credible (whether or not they ended up being right), whereas the other groups claims are not.
While it’s tempting to just classify both groups as “extremists,” I find this sort of fence-sitting precisely as useless, disingenuous, and foolish as the sort of “balanced reporting” which takes the claims of both conservatives and liberals at face-value, without fact-checking. You know the trend I mean: “One group claims the earth is round, while another maintains that it is flat. Who’s to say which one is correct?”
You’re right about the date, of course, Janus—I mixed up the election year with the inauguration year. As James says, there’s a significant qualitative difference between the two. Bush was the first president to be (effectively) named by the Supreme Court, and in a split 5-4 ruling. Four of the nation’s nine highest legal scholars argued that Bush’s presidency was at best premature and at worst illegitimate. And, of course, the case had to ascend through the court system to arrive at that point. The point is that whether President Bush was rightly (s)elected in 2002 was a topic that intelligent minds may disagree on, as evidenced by that 5-4 split. There is no such argument to be made with regard to Hawaii’s status as a state, President Obama’s birth in Hawaii, etc. Show me a split SCOTUS decision on the topic and we’ll talk. :)
Sorry, but you guys are both starting to sound to me like the Birthers who you decry for blissfully ignoring factual evidence that doesn’t fit their worldview (and are in the process proving my broader point).
First, I chose my example carefully, and Waldo, you are (whether intentionally or not) changing the scope of the example. The question in my example was not whether the Supreme Court made the “right” legal decision in December 2000. It was whether a “reasonable mind” could assert, after November 2001, that the Supreme Court’s decision made a material difference in the outcome.
That is to say: the decision halted certain specific recounts requested by Gore. What would have been the result if those specific recounts had been carried to completion? If that recount would have shown a Bush victory anyhow, then the SCOTUS action did not change the outcome.
The fact is that we do know what the result of the specific recount requested by Gore would have been, if carried to completion. That’s because the recount eventually was meticulously carried out by a consortium of a dozen or so major news organizations, and during the week of Nov 12, 2001 (hence the specific timeframe in my original example) the results were announced on the front pages of the NY Times, Washington Post, and pretty much every other newspaper in the US. The results, of course, were that the recount requested by Gore would have resulted in a Bush victory. (You’re aware of this recount exercise and its results, yes? If not, perhaps you should ask yourself why this rather salient information isn’t part of your knowledge base).
Given, to use your own standard, that there is ample evidence that the SCOTUS decision did not materially change the result, and zero evidence that it did, I state that intelligent minds may not disagree as to whether the decision itself illegitimized the result. Yet 100% of (presumed) Democratic responders to this thread seem to believe otherwise…
There are three important reasons why you’re wrong, Janus.
First because what we’re talking about is a material dispute about the election that rose to the level of the Supreme Court. There was a problem of enormous significance with the election that was settled only by the courts, not a pure electoral process. So there was obviously a debate of real substance in Bush’s election. No such problem existed with Obama’s election.
Second because the media doesn’t count votes, the government does. So while it’s altogether possible that the media count is accurate, they’re reporters, not election officials. It’s entirely understandable that a reasonable person would find their count interesting, but hardly the last word. There is no such analog in Obama’s election.
Third because high-information voters understand well that the SCOTUS vote had nothing to do with equal protection and everything to do with politics. Otherwise everybody who voted in favor of Bush would have voted in favor of Gore, and vice-versa. Every single member of the court voted precisely opposite to their known interests, as established by long judicial histories. If one of those conservative members of the court had been liberal instead, we’d instead be debating whether Gore was rightly elected to the presidency.
I think you left out a big “maybe”. Because it’s entirely possible that if they allowed the recount to continue, it would have had the same outcome as the newspaper recount, and Bush would still have been president.
Now get out there and Vote!
So a recount was carried out, and human beings performed it exactly to the precise and legally-defined standards set out by the courts in the Gore recount effort, but the results “don’t count” because we can’t be sure that human beings who are reporters are able to follow those precise instructions in the same way that human beings who are election officials would follow the same instructions.
Sounds to me quite similar in nature to a birther who says that a short-form birth certificate “doesn’t count” because the original long-form birth certificate could possibly say something different. Both persons reject the overwhelmingly likely intrepretation of the facts before them in favor of an unlikely intrepretation that better fits their world-view.
No, because in that case Gore would not have been immediately “crowned” by the decision as you imply, but rather his recount would simply have proceeded. And this is a rare instance in history when we have factual knowledge about what the result would have been in the “what if” case that you describe. For some reason, you continue to go through extraordinary contortions to avoid accepting those facts. Just like the people in your original post — again proving my main point that the behavior is not a peculiar affliction of Republicans.
I’ll have no further follow-up ; )
No, we don’t. There were a series of conflicting court rulings about which ballots should be counted, by whom, and how. So while it’s nice that journalists conducted their own count, we have no way of knowing what standard would have been required by the SCOTUS, and that’s the only standard that matters.
In 2000, there was an actual, honest-to-God, legitimate dispute about who the president was, premised on actual facts so seriously under dispute that the Supreme Court took on the case. There is no such dispute here. It doesn’t exist. By your logic, if Republicans were currently arguing that President Obama was not qualified to be president because he’s actually the reincarnation of Elvis brought here from Venus, that too would be qualitatively identical to some Democrats’ complaints that Bush was not legitimately seated. One group’s concerns were based on legal issues that the Supreme Court itself could not agree on, the other’s is based on paranoid delusions with no basis in fact, roundly rejected by the only court that has deigned to spend any time on the matter.