America, the land of WTF
Published by punkass marc October 23rd, 2006 in Politics, HUH!?It doesn’t surprise me that the Foley scandal will impact a very small minority of voters. What surprises me is that 1 in 25 American voters is actually more likely to vote for a Republican as a result:
Less than one in five voters say the page scandal will affect their vote; 12 percent are more likely to vote for the Democratic candidate in their district as a result, 4 percent are more likely to vote for the Republican, and 1 percent less likely to vote in general.
We’ve discussed the harcore 30-percenters before, the deep Republican base that would vote “R” even if President Bush and Dennis Hastert cooked and ate a baby on Rachel Ray’s show, but the Foley 4-percenters are a bit harder to explain.
Presumably, if they are “more likely” to vote Republican, this means they were recently a little soft on the Republicans, or maybe not even Republican voters at all. That Mark Foley was revealed to have doggedly pursued sex with children has provided 4% of those polled with a new resolve to vote Republican.
If Wikipedia is right, 70% of Americans are registered to vote. Let’s say that half of that 70% actually call themselves voters, which means we’d be looking at a pool of 105 million American voters. While poll data comes from a small sample, and its +/- can often be even larger than 4%, what if this were right? 4% of 105 million = 4.2 million people. Even if the poll is off by a wide margin, we could be looking at a million people more likely to vote Republican after hearing about Foley lusting after kids. I’m sure membership in NAMBLA is larger than I’d like to think, but I doubt it can count a million people among its ranks. So how come 4% of people polled are more likely to vote Republican than they were before hearing about Foley’s obsession?
The answer may lie in the morality double standard in politics. Any Republican scandal also reflects poorly on the Democrats:
Two-thirds of voters say they think the Republicans knew about Rep. Foley’s inappropriate behavior and intentionally failed to take action. At the same time, there is also suspicion of the Democrats’ on the scandal as 49 percent say the Democrats also knew about the behavior and waited until the election approached to release the information. A majority of independents agrees with each of these statements.
Who wants to bet that the 4-percenters are more angry with the Democrats than with the Republicans (who we _know_ actively covered it up) because these people automatically assume the Dems were playing “party politics” with the issue?
Or, in a wholly separate line of reasoning, it’s also possible that this 4 percent maps exactly to the number of Hummel figurine collectors in this country.
Nothing says ‘creepy person’ like a Hummel on the mantle!
Possibly some of those 4% of Americans haven’t been made aware that Fox’s labelling of Foley as a Democrat was a “mistake”?
Oh man, good call, Andrew. Foley was also mislabeled in papers like the San Jose Mercury News…
In related news, I’m pretty sure the Texas Department of Public Safety is trying to keep me from voting by being staffed with a bunch of incompetent assholes. Understaffed, at that.
I was going to say that. I saw on Media Matters that there’s a bunch of incidents of Foley being labeled a Democrat on Fox News.
Isn’t the mislabeling of Foley’s party affiliation a great example of exploiting “truthiness” to trump the truth?
It wouldn’t surprise me if it was done intentionally - the rubes who populate the “30%-ers” think Foley is either a librul trying to infiltrate the Glorious Reichwing Revolution, or should really be in the “Democrat” party anyway…
(Watched Dawn of the Dead last night and couldn’t help compare the zombies to the Kool-Aid drinkers…)
Those people could be living inside an espresso machine and still not be able to smell the coffee…
It wouldn’t surprise me if it was done intentionally - the rubes who populate the “30%-ers” think Foley is either a librul trying to infiltrate the Glorious Reichwing Revolution, or should really be in the “Democrat” party anyway…
Intentionally? What do you take them for, desperate or something? I suppose you think the 2004 election was blatantly stolen, too. Goddamn librul conspiracy theorists.
BTW, the Hummel figurine thing really is creepy. I’ve had a few kin (aunts & grandmothers, etc.) who owned a few, but no one was really a “collector”.
OTOH, Barbie collectors would have to be on the fringe too…
(all in good fun…
Four percent sounds to me like garden-variety “spite and malice” entrenchment. My retired Special Forces father would easily do something like that, especially if the Democrats made a lot of noise on this. For my part, I think the Dems, like their supporters, are dolts who are just as cynical and venal as their Republican counterparts, but if they did know about Foley and waited for the opportune moment to make hay of it, in this instance, I’d probably tip my beret at them.
On another subject, what’s so bad about Hummels? They are for the Aunt Tillies and Grandmas of this world, but so what?
I own Hummel #119, the “Postman”, or something like that, given to me long ago. It is hidden away and forgotten until I read this post, but perhaps I should stick it on my mantle as a creepy conversation piece.
But I am not more likely to vote for a Republican on account of owning this thing.
Yeah, this is the kind of merchandise you really should be looking out for.
Junk, “Love Is” does seem to encapsulate many of the stranger aspects of kitsch…
One of the things that bothered me (back in the day, when I still got a newspaper and looked through the comics hoping for some small nugget of enlightenment) is the permanent state of pre-adolescence of the “Love Is” characters.
No genitalia, no secondary sex characteristics (except for the extra two dots on her chest), all innocence, no sex, no knowledge or understanding, only the idealized bliss of a 5-year old (any parent who has had a 5-year old would have some interesting things to say about that…)…