The Cliffs of Insanity – Mark Knopfler (from the Princess Bridge soundtrack)
Today’s winner in the ‘huh, are you serious?’ category is Jason Zengerle at The New Republic (who I normally quite like):
I was pretty shocked by this new poll that found that 52 percent of Republican voters think ACORN stole the 2008 presidential election for Obama. I wanted to get some perspective, though, so I looked for polls that assessed voters’ feelings about the 2000 elections. I figured that, even with hanging chads and all, fewer Democratic voters would have considered Bush illegitimate back then than those Republicans who now feel that way about Obama. So I was pretty shocked to find this CBS Poll from January ’01, which found that 76 percent of Democrats didn’t consider Bush the legitimate winner of the 2000 election. Now, granted, this poll was taken only a few months after the Florida fiasco–which, unlike ACORN, was actually real, not to mention fresh–but still . . . 76 percent!
I’ll only say two things about this.
First, Gore actually, you know, DID win the election. Not just in a ‘he received substantially more votes’ sense (although he did, of course) but also in the sense that he almost certainly received more votes in Florida. Add in the fact that a ‘legitimate’ winner to most people means that the process by which the winner was decided ought to be fair and objective (not de facto determined by a set of 9 un-elected people serving for life making a nakedly political decision), and I’m not sure how you could with a straight face argue that Bush was the ‘legitimate winner of the 2000 election.’
Second, it’s not just that they think Obama stole the election. It’s not that they think he managed to rig hundreds of polls to all perfectly correlate with the eventual margin of victory. It’s not even that they think he stole something on the order of seven million votes. It’s that they think ACORN was the mechanism by which he did this. ACORN. I mean, ACORN.
I’m going to repeat it one more time, just to emphasize how absolutely insane this is. Fifty-two percent of polled Republicans…claimed that ACORN…stole the election. ACORN!
Sometimes I just don’t even know what to say.
ACORN…