Comments on: Crazy for God: A fifth column of insanity bred in home schools.

By: Rev Matt

Rev Matt — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 11:54:01 +0000

@Mike H: Are your math skills really that bad? Or are you just hoping people don’t do more than skim it and take you at your word?

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 11:31:16 +0000

I think there is not a valid equivilance between:

“X is the anti-christ” (where, as I understand it, “anti-christ” is some sort of magical being that in truth could not possibly exist) and “The government had an inkling but did nothing about it”

The latter is plausable (personally, I don’t know) and does not relate to non-existent spooky being thingies.

The small percentage of Americans (less than 5 percent) who thought that the US gov. actively did this is very small, and of course, they are insane. Probably.

By: Stephanie Z

Stephanie Z — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 21:20:48 +0000

For comparison’s sake, the question in the poll quoted above was, “Do you think Barack Obama is the Anti-Christ?”

http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/pdf/PPP_Release_NJ_916.pdf

By: Stephanie Z

Stephanie Z — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 21:13:27 +0000

…or took no action to stop the attacks…

I already addressed this. It has nothing to do with sides.

Given the “determined to attack within the U.S.” memo that the administration received, that may be an overstatement (or a poorly worded poll question), but no, it’s not crazy.

Others in this thread have as well. When you have an either/or question in a poll, you can’t tell what percent of the respondents are endorsing what. When you have a question in a poll that makes reference to things outside the poll (“accusations being made”), you have no way of knowing what people are mapping onto your poll question. It’s bad polling.

By: Mike H

Mike H — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 20:58:15 +0000

The numbers go way down when people are asked whether they think the federal government directly took down the towers, but I haven’t seen any of those polls that also break out the results by political persuasion.

There are also accusations being made following the 9/11 terrorist attack. One of these is: People in the federal government either assisted in the 9/11 attacks or took no action to stop the attacks because they wanted the [sic] United States to go to war in the Middle East.

Very likely 16%
Somewhat likely 20%
Not likely 59%
Don’t know 5%

Very Likely breakdown:

Dem 22.6%
GOP 4.9%
Inde 16.7

Somewhat likely breakdown:

Dem 28.2%
GOP 12.6%
Inde 15.2%

This means that, according to the Scripps poll, about half of Democrats, about a third of Independents and nearly a fifth of Republicans said it was “likely” that â??federal officials either participated in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon or took no action to stop themâ? in order to go to war.

http://realclearpolitics.blogs.time.com/2009/08/14/truther-denial/

Bur we should cut them some slack â?¦ after all they are on our side.

By: Anne Gilbert

Anne Gilbert — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 20:29:17 +0000

Unlike Schaeffer, I don’t believe the evangelicals are all, necessarily “beyond crazy”. And while I am pretty sure that the Republican party cis pretty much taken over by these “cultural conservatives”, the “cultural conservatives” themselves are being used bcy what I think are basically a bunch of fascist wannabes who want to establish a fascist state where people shout about Jesus, rather than go heiling down the main street of Yourtown USA. Some evangelciccals cbuy into this stuff, but I don’t think by any meancs all of thcem do, and while believing, litercally, in a six-dcay crecation story,c rather than evolution, may be important to them, the whole “end times” theology may or may not be so. Again, some of them obviously do, and some evangelical leaders promote this forc their own purposces, but I’m not surec it’s entirely universacl. We should be careful how we characterize some group we don’t qcuite understand. Politically, they need to be countered, vigorously, however, and if they don’t accept the facts, and promote conspiracies of one kind or another, they should be ignored. The media should be the first to start ignoring them.
Anne G

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 20:22:00 +0000

We are having a commetning issue, apparently. I’ve reported it, and I don’t underwstand it.

By: JosÃ©

I don’t know if it’s just me, but comments aren’t working in Firefox for this post. I had to use IE.

By: JosÃ©

I don’t think the conspiracy theories of 9/11 are silly given that Operation Northwoods was seriously considered.

They wouldn’t need anything on the scale of 9/11 to do the job, and they definately wouldn’t have linked everything to an intermediate terrorist group that had no involvement with Iraq. So, the idea that Bush/Cheney were behind 9/11 is still silly.

By: Devlin Carnet

Devlin Carnet — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 18:04:07 +0000

Your word for the day: misology, the hatred of reasoning