Just before hitting the hay last night, my I phone popped up a site that made me none too happy. Seems folks in Mississippi are stupid. As an alleged victim of a Mississippi public school education at both high school and college levels, I have quite a bit to say about that. Read on.
The mainstream media is having a good time with a poll that demonstrates quite simply that polls are not for people who use their brains. Several sources are beside themselves with glee in reporting this "fact." They include:
Hispanic Business
The LA Times
The San Franciso Chronicle
These results were also passed on by that bastion of impartiality, Ed Schultz, who then proceeded to (get ready for it) blame the entire thing on Sarah Palin.
Now a few points are in order here. First, as MSNBC's Chuck Todd has stated, the very polling methodology used to determine these results was so fatally flawed as to be useless. Note what Todd said:
Well, there's a couple of things. One, it's an automatic – it's a robo-survey, so you get an auto phone call and you press a button to answer the question, one if he's a Christian, two if he's a Muslim. But you introduce it – the way the question was asked, I think it just was designed to get a higher number. Because there are some Republicans who may not believe the President – who may believe the President is a – may not believe he's a Muslim, but like saying it because it's a way to attack him. It's sort of a way to needle him.
So, I think this question was designed to get a higher percentage in the answer than maybe what's actually true. And it's certainly created a buzz among liberals who are trying to create a stereotype among base conservative voters
So in other words, we now have a political guy at NBC News directly contradicting the results of a poll his own network (or its sibling anyway) published and used to bash an entire state. But given the polling methodology, I have what I think ought to be another obvious question: if this is all robo-call then please tell me how in the world you know you were ONLY calling REPUBLICANS? Hmm? How would you know that? Let me answer that for you - YOU DON'T!!! Not only that but having lived there I know that there are MANY Mississippians who are still registered Democrats because at the local level that is still the dominant party. Many of these would fit more on the Rick Santorum side of the aisle than the Barack Obama one. Yet this is touted as some big find. However, it was Joe Garofoli's snide comments that I'm going to address. Let's deal simply with his opening spin:
As you prepare to review the results Tuesday from the Mississippi and Alabama primaries, keep this stat in mind: More than half of the Republican voters in Mississippi think President Obama is a Muslim. Feel free to go ahead and start filling up the comments queue now, Birther Nation, if you’ve read this far. If you haven’t, we repeat that no, Obama is not Muslim, say numerous nonpartisan fact-checkers.
Now let's go over this with a fine tooth comb. First of all, we already noted that the polling data was obtained by robo-calling and is consquently useless. However, let's consider Garofoli's second claim - "no, Obama is not a Muslim." Let me ask what any good Magnolia State resident would in a common sense discussion of this issue - "How would you know?" Now let's do a simple "reasoning through what we do know" scenario and see what you conclude:
EVIDENCE OBAMA IS A CHRISTIAN
1) He says so.
2) He had Osama Bin Laden killed.
EVIDENCE OBAMA MIGHT NOT BE A CHRISTIAN
1) His position on homosexuality (most certainly) is at odds with his Bible.
2) His position on abortion (almost certainly) is at odds with his Bible.
3) He didn't develop a very charitable heart until after he suddenly decided he
wanted to be President. (In 2004 - before he became a Senator, Obama made over
$240,000 and gave a whopping $1500 to charity)
4) He attends a church of a pastor who hates this nation yet somehow wasn't there
often enough to hear this same pastor bashing the nation.
5) While running for President in San Francisco in 2008, he bashed small-town America
as "clinging" to "guns and religion," a suggestion that maybe his own "religion" is not
all it's cracked up to be.
6) He once said his individual salvation depends upon the "collective salvation" of his people - a view at strong variance with orthdox Christianity, which sees NT salvation as an individual responsibility by FAITH as opposed to by WORKS.
7) He had Osama Bin Laden killed.
EVIDENCE OBAMA MIGHT POSSIBLY BE A MUSLIM
1) He has a Muslim name
2) He spent several years growing up in Indonesia (not Kenya, Governor Huckabee),
a nation that is overwhelmingly Muslim
3) He has no problem with an Islamic mosque in the shadow of Ground Zero
4) He has called for a return of Israel to pre-1967 borders
5) His response to burning the Koran in Afghanistan is to apologize for it - a defensible political act to be sure, but not something we suspect he would do if it was the New Testament.
Now take a look at the reasons listed above and then tell me how anyone anywhere would be WRONG to at least suspect he might NOT be a Christian. The ONLY evidence is he says so. Then again Newt Gingrich says he's a devout Catholic, and I'd be willing to bet you that if you interviewed most Catholics (except Santorum, who I'm sure would bite his lip) they would disagree that a man married three times is very devout at all. And by the way - most of those same Mississippians consider Mormonism a cult, too.
And note that this is NOT merely a Mississippi thing. I would hope anyone who went to any school anywhere has developed his thinking enough to ask critical questions such as those. People then make deductions based upon what they do know. The most humble answer is to say, "I don't know" if one truly does not know. But people are also suspicious for one reason - Barack Obama is a politician. Politicians - even the better ones - lie all the time.
Unfortunately, a media that has people who have never set foot in the state (the notable exception being Ole Miss graduate Shepherd Smith of Fox News) have once again opted to blame a state for something that proves only that the method of questioning is flawed. Maybe if some of these folks quit looking down their noses and set aside their own assumptions of reality for a moment they would learn something. In fact, I'm going to use my Mississippi public education to give a lesson in flawed logic by Mr. Garofoli right now. It concerns his comment at the end of his article:
For a little perspective, the “Obama’s a Muslim”-believing quotient in Mississippi is more than twice as high as it is nationally according to a 2010 Pew poll.
OK, now let's talk about all that's wrong here.
1) You cannot compare a 2010 poll with a 2012 poll in something as volatile and rapidly changing as politics. The 2010 poll does not have the public's response to either the killing of Bin Laden, Obama's call for pre-1967 borders, or his apology to the Muslims just last week.
2) Unless both of these polls used the SAME methodology, comparison between them is utterly meaningless. But the most colossal flop of all is next.
3) Garofoli apparently is not smart enough with his (whever he got it) education to know that his comparison is a classic apples vs oranges comparison. In the current poll, he cites 52% of Republicans in Mississippi think Obama is a Muslim. Then he cites the 2010 poll and says that this is twice as high as nationally. But the problem is twofold: 1) his numbers are wrong because he cites the number of ALL Americans versus the number of REPUBLICAN respondents (I'm simply assuming they were all Republicans for the sake of argument); and 2) the 52% of Republicans in Mississippi who think he's a Muslim is NOT more than twice 34% of the national Republicans - unless, of course, Garofoli works for budget deficit reduction in the current administration.
I hope someone forwards this to Mr Garofoli, and I also hope he comments. After all, it must feel realy bad to be more stupid that someone (or several someones) who was the "victim" of a Mississippi public school education. This transplant "near" Mississippian will tell you two things: 1) the guy cannot do basic math; and 2) he can't reason very well, either.
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