Republicans Win the Sane Vote By a Landslide

The good news is that Republicans won a huge majority of the votes cast by sane Americans. The bad news is that about a third of the American electorate is nuts. Late last summer the Scripps Survey Research Center at Ohio University conducted a nationwide poll and discovered that more than a third of Americans suspected that the federal government "assisted in the 9/11 terrorist attacks or took no action to stop them so the United States could go to war in the Middle East." If that weren’t bad enough, fully one of every six Americans believes that the World Trade Center twin towers did not collapse because terrorists flew fully fueled airplanes into them. Instead they choose to believe that the Bush Administration rigged the towers with explosives and staged the whole event as a premeditated pretext for war.
This bit of information tells us quite a bit about the results of the election that carried the Democrats to majorities in both houses of Congress. The final, overall national senate votes broke down as 56% Democratic and 44% Republican. I think we made safely conclude that none of those adherents to conspiracy theories voted Republican. That means that well over half of the votes cast for Democrats this past Tuesday were marked by lunatics who believe the most outrageous conspiracy theories.
It makes me a little nervous to walk down the street knowing that at least one of every six adults that I pass is stark raving mad. And that at least one of the remaining six is at best somewhat neurotic.
Such lunacy is not new nor is it confined to one party. To this day there are those who insist that Franklin Roosevelt had prior knowledge of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and let it happen because he wanted to join World War II. But I doubt that the numbers that believed that ever constituted a significant fraction of the electorate.
Just before Tuesday’s election, registered Democrats composed only 36.8% of registered voters. We can probably peel off about two or three percent from the lunatic fringe and assume that they compose the Green Party, leaving 30% . That would mean that conspiracy theorists compose more than 80% of registered Democrats. It will be interesting to see if the Democrats will manage to govern responsibly while nurturing their kook base. These nuts expect to have their paranoid fantasies stroked and indulged. They are going to want Democrats to investigate, expose the truth of these theories and impeach the president. If they follow that path then they will alienate the independent voters who put them over the top last Tuesday. Failure to assuage the nut roots will estrange the Democratic Party from its most loyal constituency.
It’s more than a bit frightening when, here in the 21st century, with all of the sources of information available that such willful ignorance manages to flourish. But if there is a party where such nonsense can thrive, it is within the Democratic Party.
A not insignificant proportion of this party’s base believes that George Bush ordered the destruction of New Orleans levees during Hurricane Katrina because he wanted to kill black people. Dennis Kucinich, who ran for Democratic nomination for president in 2004 and who still holds a seat in the House of Representatives, introduced a bill in 2001 that would forbid the United States military from deploying space-based mind control weapons. During the 1980’s, Democratic members of Congress accused Ronald Reagan and Oliver North of peddling crack cocaine in black neighborhoods to raise money to support the Contra revolution in Nicaragua.
What is different now is that what was once an entertaining collection of fringe kooks has now grown to become an overwhelming majority of the Democratic Party. Now that the nut roots have given the Democrats control of Congress, they’re going to expect to be fed red meat in the form of investigations and perhaps a public hanging or two.
I have always thought that the Democratic Party fed on ignorance fertilized by the mainstream media. But, I had no idea. This kind of paranoia is North Korean or Iranian in scope.
I predict a couple of turbulent years for the Democrats as they try to maintain a facade of respectability while keeping their core constituency satisfied.