America the Clueless

[Scuba]

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/12/opinion/sunday/bruni-america-the-clueless.html

According to another survey, taken last year, about 65 percent of us can’t name a single Supreme Court justice. Not the chief one, John Roberts. Not the mute one, Clarence Thomas. Not even the mean one, Antonin Scalia. Though when it comes to Scalia, perhaps the body politic suffers less from ignorance than from repressed memory.

...

Here’s one of my favorite findings: in a poll in 2011, after intense, closely chronicled fiscal battles in California, a sampling of the state’s residents were quizzed about which category of spending accounted for the biggest share of California’s budget. Only 16 percent correctly said public education through the 12th grade. And they did this poorly in spite of being given just four possible answers, including the correct one, from which to choose. They more or less underperformed the odds.

...


At a heated point of the 2012 presidential primaries, when both Rick Santorum and the news media were making much of his faith and fecundity, less than 30 percent of voters could identify his religious affiliation as Catholic, according to one poll. Months later a different poll asked voters about President Obama’s religious affiliation, persistently mistaken by some Americans to be Muslim. The good news? The share of voters making the Muslim error had dropped, to 10 percent. The weird news? Eighteen percent said Obama was Jewish.

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Into the vacuum of substantive knowledge rush the unprincipled advertisements, the unctuous hucksters, the “super PACs,” the Swift boating, the Sunday-morning-talk-show spin. A clueless electorate is a corruptible one, and one that seems ill poised to make the smartest, best call about something as sweeping as Obamacare and how it gets tweaked or not down the line. Maybe we’ll blink our way to the right decisions. Or maybe we’ll just stumble around with our eyes closed.

[Egalitarian Thug]

1. The first step in solving any problem is to first identify that problem.

The American Ignorance Quotient has been rapidly rising for a long time. We're both dumber and fatter than ever before. So dumb in fact, that we get really angry when others point it out (though we're not really sure why we're angry, but we know for sure that we are).

[CJCRANE]

2. "Eighteen percent said Obama was Jewish".

I suppose that's due to the "Barak" / "Barack" similarity.

That's going to lead to a whole new slew of conspiracy theories (if it hasn't already)!

[malthaussen]

3. Damn, and here I thought Mr Obama was a Jewish Muslim. n.t