The Living Room Times

It’s official: the Angry Right of 2009 is verifiably more insane than the Angry Left of 2001-2005.

How do I know? Because of this poll:

The poll asked this question: “Do you think that Barack Obama legitimately won the Presidential election last year, or do you think that ACORN stole it for him?” The overall top-line is legitimately won 62%, ACORN stole it 26%.

Among Republicans, however, only 27% say Obama actually won the race, with 52% — an outright majority — saying that ACORN stole it, and 21% are undecided. Among McCain voters, the breakdown is 31%-49%-20%. By comparison, independents weigh in at 72%-18%-10%, and Democrats are 86%-9%-4%.

Now, look: the poll is by Public Policy Polling, a Democratic outfit… but a respectable one, to the best of my understanding. And it’s certainly a leading question — if ACORN wasn’t mentioned specifically, maybe conservatives would get less riled up, and would be more likely to give a reasonable answer — but still: the results say what they say. This poll finds that a majority of Republicans think Obama’s election was illegitimate, that the presidency was “stolen.” This, even though Obama won 52.9% to 45.6% nationally — a margin of 9,549,105 votes — and 365 to 173 in the Electoral College.

So, how does this compare with the Left’s election-related paranoia of the early 2000s? Well, when many Democrats claimed that Bush “stole” the 2000 election, they were being imprecise and annoying, but their beef was at least plausible: Gore won the national popular vote by 0.5%, and lost the electoral vote by a razor-thin 271-266 margin, solely by virtue of a stunningly close, indeed statistically tied, 537-vote margin in Florida.

(On the flip side, GOP claims that the 2004 Washington gubernatorial election and the 2008 Minnesota Senate election were “stolen” fall into a similar category as Dems’ claims about the 2000 presidential election. These arguments are overly simplistic and irritatingly blind to contrary facts, and they fundamentally misunderstand the nature of elections — but at least they’re plausible, in the sense that the elections were close enough that, in theory, they feasibly could have been “stolen.”)

When some Democrats claimed that Bush “stole” the 2004 election, they were being stupid and hypocritical, since: (1) Bush won the popular vote — a constitutionally irrelevant measuring stick, yes, but one these same voters had enthusiastically used in 2000 to discredit Bush’s disputed victory — by a clear 2.4% margin; and (2) Bush’s margin in the decisive state of Ohio, while it initially appeared quite close, ended up being a rather decisive 118,601 votes (2.1%). But at least we were still talking about a small city’s worth of votes in a single state, so the complaints, while unreasonable and ridiculous, arguably were not utterly and completely insane.

Claims that Obama “stole” the 2008 election, on the other hand? Absolute, certifiable, throw-’em-in-a-mental-hospital insanity. John McCain fell almost ten million votes short of a popular-vote victory, and a whopping 97 electoral votes short of the presidency. In order to “flip” the result, McCain would have had to win a minimum of seven states that he didn’t: most plausibly, North Carolina, Indiana, Florida, Ohio, Virginia, Colorado and New Hampshire. Obama’s average percentage margin in those seven states was 4.8%. His combined raw-vote margin? 1,058,763 votes. That’s almost ten times Bush’s margin in Ohio in 2004, and almost two thousand times Bush’s margin in Florida in 2000.

And yet 54 percent of Republicans honestly believe that ACORN generated literally millions of fake votes and handed Obama the election. Here is a short list of things that are more plausible than this belief:

• Barack Obama was born in Kenya.
• Sarah Palin is Trig Palin’s grandmother.
• The 9/11 attacks were an inside job.
• The Moon landing was faked.

I’m serious. Each and every one of those insane conspiracy theories is more plausible than “ACORN stole the 2008 election for Obama.”

While I could go the “ha ha, Republicans are idiots” route here, I actually take no joy in this at all. If these poll results are accurate, they are deeply disturbing for the health of our Republic. They are also the latest damning piece of evidence against the failed institution known as American journalism, which now rarely rises above the level of substanceless distraction and abject propaganda, and which, as a rule, utterly fails to educate or inform the citizenry about a God damn thing (in large part because We, The People, demand to be neither educated nor informed). Only in today’s media climate could a majority of any group more mainstream than the Flat Earth Society believe something so completely f***ing ridiculous as “ACORN stole the 2008 election.”

I actually really hope this poll is flawed in some significant way, because if it’s accurate, God help us.