27 Percenters: Still Crazy After All These Years

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There's been a lot of talk lately about the 1 percent versus the 99 percent. But there's another number that's at least as important in American political discourse these days. That number is the "crazification factor": 27 percent. 

The crazification factor was first noticed by, of all people, television writer John Rogers. He first wrote about it as far back as 2005 on his blog, titled "Kung Fu Monkey." He'd observed the 2004 Illinois Senate election, in which Barack Obama ran against Alan Keyes. Keyes, as you may remember, was trotted in from out of state a mere 86 days before the election after the campaign of the Republican nominee, Jack Ryan, imploded because of a bizarre sex scandal.
Keyes was clearly a sacrificial lamb, a guy no one expected to win; not only did he have no base in Illinois, but he was also, as Rogers put it, "plainly, obviously, completely crazy ... head-trauma crazy."Both candidates were black, so race wasn't a factor. And yet, Rogers noted, Keyes still got 27 percent of the vote in Illinois.

"They put party identification, personal prejudice, whatever, ahead of rational judgment," he said. "Even 5 percent of Democrats voted for him. That's crazy behavior. I think you have to assume a 27 percent crazification factor in any population."

It seemed like a joke to me at first. But then I noticed that that 27 percent figure kept cropping up more and more, in poll after poll. Give or take a couple of percentage points, pollsters often find about 27 percent of Americans who believe in things that are against their own self-interest or that are just mind-bendingly ridiculous.

For instance, in the darkest days of the 2008 economic meltdown, after the bankruptcy of Lehmann Brothers, the federal bailout of AIG and the collapse of Merrill Lynch, approval ratings for President George W. Bush were still at 27 percent, and hovered around that figure for quite some time before taking their final nosedive.

(Yes, He Who Must Not Be Named, and not Barack Obama, was president when the economy tanked, with his beloved tax cuts firmly in place, something you probably won't learn from watching Fox News.)

After Sarah Palin flamed out in spectacular fashion and took John McCain's presidential campaign into the ground with her, 27 percent of people surveyed in one poll still thought she would have made a good president.

A poll in January of this year on the subject of gridlock in Congress found that 60 percent of those polled believed that President Obama was trying to work with Republicans; 27 percent believed that Republicans in Congress were trying to do the same. In January, an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found that 27 percent of people still supported the tea party.
Give a couple of points margin for error, and crazification becomes more obvious. After the 2008 election, 26 percent of those polled believed that it had been stolen for Barack Obama by ACORN, even though there wasn't evidence of a single fraudulent vote actually being cast as a result of a few registration workers boosting their paychecks by signing up nonexistent voters. (No, Mickey Mouse did not try to vote, something you probably won't learn from listening to Rush Limbaugh.)

During the health care debate, when polled as to what kind of reform bill should pass, 26 percent of respondents told a CBS poll "no bill at all."

Note well: We aren't talking about people who simply don't agree with the administration. That figure is, of course, higher than 27 percent. We're talking about people who do so for reasons that are completely and incurably crazy, people wedded to "facts" that simply aren't true and opinions with no support in reality.

They're immune to persuasion. They're aided by right-wing media outlets that reject the idea of objective facts and objective proof; any evidence you care to provide that does not fit their narrative is, to them, the product of "bias" or an "agenda," no matter how unimpeachable the source. That's one of the hallmarks of true delusional thinking: It's immune to reality, and so are the 27 percenters.

So what can you do? Well, if you're one of those people who roll their eyes at the idea that President Obama is going to send federal agents to check on your light bulbs, or who shake your heads in disbelief when people, after all this time, still put up billboards and bumper stickers asking "Where's the Birth Certificate?" - then you need to get out and vote.

Because the crazies surely will.

DHS Saves Us From Terrorist Tweeters

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It's often said that the Americans and the British are "two peoples separated by a common language." Recently, a pair of British tourists learned the hard way just how dangerous that can be.
Bar manager Leigh van Bryan, 24, of Coventry, and his friend, 26-year-old Emily Bunting, of Birmingham, were very excited about their upcoming trip to Hollywood. Leigh (who, like everyone else under the age of 35 these days, has an account on Twitter) sent a message to another friend asking if she'd like to have a drink "before I go and destroy America."
Now, as it turns out, "destroy" is a term used among young Britons to indicate that one intends to party hard. To get plastered, bombed, wasted. To, in a more familiar American idiom, paint the town red.
It seems that a lot of the slang used in Perfidious Albion has a violent and vaguely sinister cast. For instance, when someone from the UK tells you he could "murder an Indian," he is not expressing homicidal frustration with some unhelpful call-center wallah from Bangalore. He's telling you he's hungry for curry, which seems to have replaced fish and chips as the primary take-away food of the British Isles.
If they say they're going to "pop out and smoke a fag," they're not planning to ambush a homosexual by jumping out of an alley and shooting him; they're going outside for a cigarette.
If a Brit wants to "have a butcher's" at something, it means they want to have a look. Describing someone as "dead sexy" doesn't mean they resemble a hot zombie; it's the equivalent of "drop-dead gorgeous." And so on.
(Thanks to my UK pals Georgette Goldie and John Rickards for advice on the slang).
Apparently the U.S. Department of Homeland Security does not have a dictionary of British slang handy. It does, however, have some way to scan the Twitterverse for ominous words and phrases like "destroy America." Therefore, when Leigh and Emily landed at LAX, they were detained, handcuffed, thrown into a cell, interrogated, then unceremoniously hustled onto the next plane back to England.
Reports that Fox News pundit and former Republican presidential candidate Pat Buchanan flew into a rage and had to be sedated when he found out that the DHS had failed to waterboard the couple could not be confirmed at press time.
I don't know about you, but I certainly feel a whole lot safer. I'll sleep so much better tonight knowing that Homeland Security is out there, reading Twitter (which their official report refers to repeatedly as "Tweeter"), looking for the buzzwords that will aid them in their tireless quest to protect us from the peril of 20-something British hipsters coming to our shores to get their drink on.
They even searched Leigh and Emily's luggage looking for shovels and picks because Leigh had posted another joking tweet about "digging up Marilyn Monroe." The young man's attempts to explain that this was a reference to an episode of the American TV series "Family Guy" fell on deaf ears.
"You really [bad word] up when you sent that tweet, boy," one DHS agent is reported to have told Leigh before they threw him in the cage.
So, from this, we learn quite a few things about the Department of Homeland Security. They believe that the next major terrorist attack might be perpetrated by someone who will telegraph the strike by posting explicitly about it on Twitter, even though DHS is not really sure of Twitter's actual name.
They also believe that such an attack might take the form of an attempt to dig up long-dead movie stars by people who lug shovels across the Atlantic in their luggage because they don't realize America has hardware stores. They don't watch "Family Guy." And finally, they make Buford T. Justice, the comically incompetent redneck sheriff from "Smokey and the Bandit" look like Jack Bauer from "24."



Maybe I'm being too hard on the DHS guys. Maybe they're only acting like idiots as part of a cunning plan to lull the bad guys into a false sense of security. I know one thing: It's a bad idea to post the words "destroy America" in print or on-line.
Excuse me, I have to go now. There's someone hammering on my door.