I Wouldn't Call Them Idiots

One aspect of American politics that receives insufficient attention is that a significant percentage of self-identified Republicans — around half — are complete idiots. And the candidates who wish to be elected by them must pander to them, either by being idiots themselves — see “Bachmann, Michele” — or pretending to be. Nobody in the MSM is empowered to say this aloud. Indeed, the very act of pointing it out brands one a “liberal elitist” who is biased against proud, patriotic conservatives.

Well, so be it. A quarter of Republicans questioned profess to believe that ACORN is definitely planning to steal the 2012 election while another 32 percent think it might be. These numbers are admittedly lower than the 52 percent who, in 2009, went on record accusing ACORN of having stolen the election for Obama, but this should strike a person with normal mental faculties as a mite surprising, given that the organization no longer exists. Similarly, a recent poll of Republicans found that 48 percent of those questioned believe that Barack Obama was born in the United States. Again, this is almost double the 28 percent who believed it in February, but it is still rather low, given that Hawaii released the president’s long-form birth certificate to satisfy exactly this group of noisy idiots.

These are rather obvious examples, but it is hardly an exaggeration to insist that this astonishing combination of willful ignorance and stubborn stupidity can be found virtually everywhere Republican politics are discussed.
~ from The Problem of Republican Idiots by Eric Alterman ~

I wouldn't call the majority of Republicans idiots; I think it is more a case of being ill-informed.

A lot of these people have two strikes against them from the get-go. First, a lot of them get most of their information from Faux Nooz. That right there is bound to screw with anyone's head. I mean, if you consider Bill O'Reilly or Glenn Beck as this generation's Walter Cronkite, you will have a very warped perspective of what's up and what's down.

If this wasn't bad enough, many of these ill-informed conservatives concurrently are impacted by fundamentalist Christian churches. You know the kind -- the ones who believe that a 2,000 year old book written by nomadic tribesmen is God-breathed truth. (You can't see it, but I'm rolling my eyes!)

You add these two things together and it's no wonder these people don't seem to know their asses from a hole in the ground.

That said, while most Democratic Party supporters seem a lot better informed on subjects like science, history and the arts, many of them have a warped view of what's going on in this country as well. These folks get their information from the mainstream media which, unfortunately, isn't THAT FAR above Faux Nooz!!