It cannot be said enough: Dumbing down the populace has always improved the GOP's ability to get people to vote against their interests. AlterNet's Sarah Seltzer looks at some of the dumb things that Americans apparently believe, most of which is due to right wing demagoguery on the issues:

We’ve gone far beyond Stephen Colbert’s “truthiness” into a more “truth-be-damned” environment; what Rick Perlstein described in the Daily Beast as a “mendocracy. As in, rule by liars.”Here are some examples of recent ways we have made inroads in ignorance:

• Polling data during and after last week’s midterm elections suggested that many Americans genuinely believe President Obama has raised their taxes -- even though the reality is that our president actually lowered them for most of us. This means that people trust pundits like Rush Limbaugh, a major force behind spreading that lie, over the numbers on their own tax returns.
• Another recent phenomenon? Half of new Congressmen don’t believe in the reality of global warming. It’s not that they don’t just disagree on the source or the severity of the problem. They flat out don’t think the world is getting warmer--despite the evidence outside their windows.
• The new Congress will probably try to restore millions of dollars of funding for scientifically inaccurate, largely disastrous abstinence-only curriculum in schools, many of which have been shown to spread lies like "condoms don't work" and "abortion causes cancer."
• News outlets picked up a wildly inflated and completely outlandish claim from an Indian blog that Obama’s trip abroad cost $200 million a day--and listeners have swallowed it. (In this case, the White House flat-out denied it.)

And that's only the tip of the idiotic iceberg.

• Nearly one-fifth of Americans think Obama is a Muslim. Thanks, Fox news, for acting like this was a matter of opinion, not fact.
• 25 percent of Americans don’t believe in Darwin’s theory of evolution while less than 40 percent do. Consider the fact that several of our newly elected officials, specifically newly elected Kansas Governor Sam Brownback, share that belief.
• Earlier this year, nearly 40 percent of Americans still believed the Sarah Palin-supported lie about "death panels" being included in health care reform.
• As of just a few years ago, about half of Americans still suspected a connection between Saddam Hussein and the attacks of September 11, a lie that was reinforced by none other than Dick Cheney.
• While a hefty amount of this demonstrable cluelessness gets better as the respondents get younger, all is not well in the below-30 demographic. A majority of “young Americans” cannot identify Iraq or Afghanistan--the places their peers are fighting and dying--on a map.
• Two out of five Americans, despite the whole separation of church and state being a foundation of our democracy thing, think teachers should be able to lead prayer in classrooms. So it seems those right-wingers clamoring to tear down the wall between church and state aren’t the only ones who don’t know their constitutional principles.
• Many Americans still believe in witchcraft, ESP and other supernatural phenomena. Does that explain why Christine O’Donnell was so quick to deny her “dabbling”?
• Speaking of antiquated religious beliefs, about a decade ago, 20 percent of Americans still believed that the sun revolves around the earth. That's just sad, considering that even the Vatican has let Galileo off the hook for being right.
• Only about half of Americans realize that Judaism is the oldest of the three monotheistic religions. Other examples of wild misunderstanding about religion and the separation of church and state can be found in this fall’s Pew survey on Americans’ religious knowledge.

OK, what the heck is CNN doing in this segment? Is there something wrong with Blitzer and their news department? For them to waste almost three minutes of their biggest news show on something as trivial and ignorant as the conservative kerfluffle over Obama's bow to King Abdullah is quite shocking.

The only people making this a story are right-wing fanatics such as wingnut billionare Richard Melon Scaife' and his op-ed pages, looking for any excuse to attack President Obama.

And Blitzer praises CNN reporter Dan Lothian as if it were an incredible question to ask Robert Gibbs. The Pittsburgh Gazzette is proof positive that "people" are just so upset by it. And I think Gibbs is 100% right when he says America couldn't care less about this.

Transcripts:

BLITZER: But I want to move on to some controversy involving the president when he was in Europe last week.

He met with the king of Saudi Arabia. We got a picture there. I think we also have some video as well. He appears to bow when he met with King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. And the White House press secretary Robert Gibbs had this exchange with our Dan Lothian over at the White House briefing earlier.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DAN LOTHIAN, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: It does appear that the president actually bowed to King Abdullah. Did he bow or didn't he?

GIBBS: I think he bent over with both to shake -- with both hands to shake his hands. So I don't...

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Well, we've known for awhile that the wingnuts are getting themselves all worked up into a nice paranoid tizzy over the nonexistent evil liberal plan to reinstitute the Fairness Doctrine.

Still there was Fox News' Casey Stegall hot on the case today from LA. But notice something missing from the report? That's right -- any actual liberals who are advocating such a thing. So Stegall gives this lame excuse:

But not a single lawmaker who has called for a return of the Fairness Doctrine rules, when offered this national platform, would go on camera to talk about it.

That's right, those evil liberals are so sneaky they're planning this but not talking about it. Though you'd think he'd at least be able to name one of those "single lawmakers."

I'm sure the logical reality -- that in fact there are no liberals who are proposing such a thing anywhere either in Congress or at the FCC -- didn't cross Stegall's mind.

Or at least, they didn't let it ruin an otherwise perfectly good storyline.

Fox News, Fake News. What's the diff?

Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R) has been a favorite of the Grover Norquist crowd for quite a while, in part because of his fealty to the far-right agenda on taxes and spending. But once in a while, reality gets in the way of conservative talking points.

In the past two years, Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota twice vetoed legislation to raise the state’s gas tax to pay for transportation needs.

Now, with at least five people dead in the collapse of the Interstate 35W bridge here, Mr. Pawlenty, a Republican, appears to have had a change of heart.

“He’s open to that,” Brian McClung, a spokesman for the governor, said Monday of a higher gas tax. “He believes we need to do everything we can to address this situation and the extraordinary costs.”

Better late than never, I suppose.

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FSM bless Sarah Palin; she is the gift that keeps on giving to progressive America. Now that she is no longer kept sequestered by the McCain campaign, she bursting out into the media, showing us exactly the results of 25 years of conservative rule. All I can say, is that I think the McCain campaign was smart to keep her away from the cameras as much as they did.

Wolf Blitzer asks Palin to comment on the historic occasion of our first African American presidency (why? Does Palin have some special insight into the African American experience? Hell, I'm pretty sure that she's only vaguely aware of history) and Palin trots out the rote talking points that she's looking forward to working with him, especially on energy independence (she keeps using that phrase, but I'm not sure she knows what it means. Energy independence doesn't mean more checks for Alaskans solely, does it?). But Blitzer points out that Palin's campaign rhetoric (oh Wolf, let's not play the blame game) and Palin unapologetically reiterates the Ayers smear.

PALIN: It would be my honor to assist and support our new president and the new administration, yes. And I speak for other Republicans, other Republican governors also. They being willing, also, to, again, seize this opportunity that we have to progress this nation together, a united front.

BLITZER: Because, you know, during a campaign, every presidential campaign, things are said that's tough. As you well know, it gets sometimes pretty fierce out there.

And during the campaign, you said this. You said, This is not a man who sees America as you see it and how I see America. And then you went on to say, Someone who sees America, it seems as being so imperfect that he's palling around with terrorists who would target their own country.

PALIN: Well, I still am concerned about that association with Bill Ayers. And if anybody still wants to talk about it, I will, because this is an unrepentant domestic terrorist who had campaigned to blow up, to destroy our Pentagon and our U.S. Capitol. That's an association that still bothers me, and I think it's still fair to talk about it.

Yup, there's your united Republican front all right.

Transcripts below the fold

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