It's time to wrest polits away from the politians and return it to the American people, 16% of whom appear to be utter morons.
While I was languishing in the airport yesterday, beacon of vigilance Ben Fowlkes sent me the most recent Daily Kos/Research 2000 poll of registered Republicans. It is disturbing. It starts off okay, with a healthy number of respondents expressing their intention to vote in the 2010 congressional election and their reluctance to settle on a candidate for president in 2012. It’s disappointing to see Sarah Palin in the lead—and terrifying to see Dick Cheney in third—but three years ahead of the actual election, name recognition is pretty much all there is. Things start to get a little crazy with question three, in which 39% of Republicans opine that President Obama should be impeached. Exactly what crime he has committed goes unspecified, but perhaps respondents were rushing to get to the next question, in which nearly two-thirds of those polled agree that the president is a socialist. Thus begins a series of money shots, in a barrage of insanity that leaves the reader crouched numbly on the floor like a Japanese girl on the internet. If this poll is to be believed, 73% of Republicans think homosexuals shouldn’t be allowed to be schoolteachers. Seventy-seven percent want the Biblical account of creation from Genesis to be taught in public schools. Thirty-one percent want to outlaw contraception. And fully 23% of Republicans believe that their state should secede from the United States of America.
It’s sixteen degrees in Montana, and word ’round the Combat! blog offices is that today’s bitter cold is part of some sort of pattern that might last for months. It seems like only a week ago we were in sunny California, kind of posting vague reminders that the outside world existed between bouts of eating and abruptly falling asleep. All that is like unto a dream now, as the cruel winds of the national zeitgeist or possibly just some regular geist howl and batter against our windows. It’s really sunny out there, too. That’s the worst. Fortunately, we’ve got the internet to keep us warm, and there’s enough absurd stuff going on out there to keep one burning with indignation throughout the sharpest cold snap. Except our toes. Our toes are going to be cold until April, and we just need to accept that.