Friday, August 27, 2010

Lots of Americans Are Stupid

... that's the only message I can think was intended by the polls that wondered how many of us thought Obama is a Muslim. That thought jumped out at me as I read Peggy Noonan's column today.
For a week all you heard from cable anchors was "PEOPLE think OBAMA is a MUSLIM. It's in the POLLS. How do you EXPLAIN it?" Every time I heard it, I'd think: Maybe it's because you keep screaming it.
Why in the world was this question even asked in a poll? What was the purpose? Given that some of us think the moon landings were faked or the government was behind 9/11, there was never any doubt that this question would get a healthy batch of positive answers.

Why ask it?

The whole purpose of asking questions where you know you'll get an incorrect answer is to show what a pack of morons those people are. I'm trying to imagine the staff meetings in the news media where they discussed how to divide up the 22 minutes of air time they have for their nightly news broadcasts. What was the point of making this poll a big portion of it? "Hey, I know, let's make fun of the dummies in our audience! Let's make them feel small and ignorant!"

And that was a good idea because ... why?

Update: Our Monks of Miscellaneous Musings address the issue, but not the question of "Why?"

5 comments:

tim eisele said...

Well, why do they ask any question in a publicly-released poll? I'm pretty sure that the purpose of most polls is not to actually find out anything, but to push agendas by asking slanted questions, and then loudly proclaiming either "See, you should support us, everybody else does!", or "See, all these people who hold nutty ideas are a growing danger and must be stopped!"

I made the mistake of actually going along with a couple of phone polls a while back, and they asked me these huge laundry lists of questions with the obvious goal of wanting to pick the one or two that got the kind of responses that they wanted. Now I just hang up on pollsters. Bunch of manipulative creeps, for the most part.

K T Cat said...

Ha! You fell right into my trap by answering my poll question!

Muuuuhahahaha! Now I shall ... I shall ... err, I shall ...

So now just what does one do with these poll answers?

K T Cat said...

In all seriousness, I think you're right. The goal is to shame people who hold incorrect opinions. "People who oppose Obama think he's a Muslim. They are stupid." If you don't want to be lumped in with the stupid people, you won't oppose Obama.

Mostly Nothing said...

Could it be a backlash against the MSM?

How many times have you answered stupid quizzes like this purposely wrong?

Dean said...

KT, thanks for the link.

You and Tim both touch on it: Obama's numbers are in the tank so the purpose of asking questions of that nature is to divert attention away from a stalling economy and an incompetent Presidency of perpetual vacationing.