Americans are painfully stupid

Yep.  Barack Obama is trying to give Americans more credit than they deserve (“they must think you’re stupid!”) and John McCain is counting on Americans being stupid.  That’s the story of this election, in a nutshell.  An op-ed in today’s WaPo scares the hell out of me, and makes me sad for my fellow countrymen, who are apparently all ‘tarded:

American voters, who are hiring the people who’ll run a superpower democracy, are grossly ignorant. Here are a few particularly bogus claims about their supposed savvy.

1. Our voters are pretty smart.

…[B]y every measure social scientists have devised, voters are spectacularly uninformed…According to an August 2006 Zogby poll, only two in five Americans know that we have three branches of government and can name them.

UGH!  It’s 3:30 in the afternoon, and I still haven’t had enough coffee to deal with that statistic!

A 2006 National Geographic poll showed that six in ten young people (aged 18 to 24) could not find Iraq on the map.

2006.  That’s just fuckin’ great.  Three years into an illegal war against the country, and 60% of young voters couldn’t find it on the map.

…[F]ewer than half of all Americans know who Karl Marx was…

I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that most of the dumbass conservatives who called progressives “Marxists” couldn’t tell you three things about Karl Marx if you held them at gunpoint.

Worse, they found that just 49 percent of Americans know that the only country ever to use a nuclear weapon in a war is their own.

Oh, dear god.  We’re surrounded by dangerously uninformed people…another question I’d ask Americans would be, “When’s the last time America won a war?”  That’s a reality check a lot of morons out there need.

The article does mention that viewers of both The Daily Show and of The O’Reilly Factor have similar numbers of highly informed voters, which isn’t all that surprising to me, because we’re comparing audiences that are actually at least watching something.  But most Americans aren’t watching anything, unfortunately.  Consider the next part:

3. If you just give Americans the facts, they’ll be able to draw the right conclusions.

Unfortunately, no. Many social scientists have long tried to downplay the ignorance of voters, arguing that the mental “short cuts” voters use to make up for their lack of information work pretty well. But the evidence from the past few years proves that a majority can easily be bamboozled.

I bet they’re going to talk about the Iraq war!  (I have a right to be snobby about this one — I was against the Iraq war on policy and on principle, and I was 23 years old.  I heard/read all the information and I just said “Bullshit!”  I was right.)

Just before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, after months of unsubtle hinting from Bush administration officials, some 60 percent of Americans had come to believe that Iraq was behind the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, despite the absence of evidence for the claim, according to a series of surveys taken by the PIPA/Knowledge Networks poll.

That, honestly, was the moment that I realized how grossly ignorant Americans were.  All kinds of people believed it.  People I considered smart were being taken in.  It wasn’t about intelligence, it was about being and remaining utterly oblivious.

A year later, after the bipartisan, independent 9/11 Commission reported that Saddam Hussein had had nothing to do with al-Qaeda’s assaults on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, 50 percent of Americans still insisted that he did.

Morons.  There’s more painful news in the article, but it’s not helping me in the positive attitude department, so I’m going to try to find a picture of a puppy or something.