The gift that keeps on giving:
John: Hey, Bush is now at 37% approval. I feel much less like Kevin McCarthy screaming in traffic. But I wonder what his base is —
Tyrone: 27%.
John: … you said that immmediately, and with some authority.
Tyrone: Obama vs. Alan Keyes. Keyes was from out of state, so you can eliminate any established political base; both candidates were black, so you can factor out racism; and Keyes was plainly, obviously, completely crazy. Batshit crazy. Head-trauma crazy. But 27% of the population of Illinois voted for him. They put party identification, personal prejudice, whatever ahead of rational judgement. Hell, even like 5% of Democrats voted for him. That’s crazy behaviour. I think you have to assume a 27% Crazification Factor in any population.
Although it appears that not even crazy people will vote for Mickey Kaus, who got only 5% of the vote.
Redshirt
Mickey’s the wrong kind of crazy is all. If he had the right wingnut pedigree, he’d get his 27%.
Punchy
But 83.2% of goats support him!
If he ever runs for 4H Club President, he wins in a landslide.
Emma
You know, we’ve always had that 27% with us, and in times of national stress, they come out to play. They’re just more visible now.
jibeaux
Exactly. I think all that means is that Mickey is 18.5% crazy. Once he reaches greater purity, his numbers will climb.
Lynn
So, how does that craziness factor differ by region? It seems intuitively logical that New England, for example, might be closer to 18% and the Deep South closer to 35%.
Here in the Pacific Northwest, I’d go for about 22%. But Idaho . . .
Trinity
That 27% scares the shit out of me. Wtf? Who ARE these people??
Hunter Gathers
Erick Erickson would have gotten his 27%, Mickey. Try harder next time.
mistermix
I’m sure Mickey’s poor showing can be explained by the massive cross-over of Dems who picked up a R ballot to vote for ORLY, and I await Mickey’s first blog post to that effect.
cleek
Mickey’s too boring to activate the Crazification centers in voters’ brains. but Taitz lights ’em up like a black light lights up motel bed sheets.
arguingwithsignposts
Mickey Kaus ran as a Democrat. Simple enough. The 27% is voting GOP all the way, baby!
Brandon
The “population” is the entire voting population. In this case our population is on the R primary. I don’t know the ratio of D to R or relative participation rates, but it seems to me that the “crazification factor” in the CA voting population is less than 50% of Taitz’s vote total. They did all vote for the Governator though, twice, so there’s that.
Captain Haddock
So rule of thumb:
~25% of population are batshit crazy
~5% are smug contrarians
Face
Maybe 25.7% of the Cali population votes while drunk.
GregB
Has Orly held the presser blaming the commies, Muslims, gays, Obamas’ secret militias and the Bilderberg’s for stealing her election yet?
Bill E Pilgrim
My sentiments exactly. Well almost exactly, my comment here from late last night:
Woodrow "asim" Jarvis Hill
As much as I love me some LEVERAGE, I really miss John writing politics. It’s insane that some Comedian/Scriptwriter/Bartender dude beats the pants off most pundits, but that’s what John did on a regular basis, and with entertaining prose, to boot.
Even his years-old screed about enablers like Dershowitz is of a piece with the impasse many of us feel around Israeli/Jewish politics.
Ash Can
@GregB: Whenever it happens, I hope someone YouTubes it. It’d be a smash hit.
Lawnguylander
Einstein theorized that there was a crazological constant that would vote for the likes of Orly Taitz but ultimately found the idea of such people existing too weird and renounced his own theory.
The Grand Panjandrum
Poor Mickey. At least many cities and towns in California now use goats to reduce weeds on public lands. That should keep him occupied for a while.
JGabriel
Orly Taitz didn’t win?
Sigh.
That gives me a sad-on.
.
fanshawe
Some further evidence. Interestingly enough, both the top-level question, and the sub-question both roughly fit the 27% rule.
feebog
Uh, an apples v. oranges comparison here. While I will grant you that Taitz and Kraus are both crazy as loons, they were running in DIFFERENT PRIMARIES! Taitz got 25% of the REPUBLICAN vote, while Kraus got 5% of the Democratic vote. The conclusion to draw here is there are five times as many batshit crazy Republicans as Dems.
slag
What’s always bugged me about this is the realization of how big a percentage 27% really is. I’ve always estimated our crazification factor at about 33%. But even the thought of bringing that down to 25% doesn’t help much. So, at least 1 in 4 people in this country are head-trauma crazy? That realization certainly doesn’t help me sleep at night.
Mark
Aside from adopting Louisiana-style primaries, California voters actually avoided the crazy pretty well last night. We didn’t let a car insurance company re-write our laws and we didn’t give away our right to start public utilities with a majority vote.
And based on the 900 million commercials I saw in the last month, even the Republicans voted for a “liberal” governor who loves Barbara Boxer and has no “daylight” between her immigration policy and Obama’s. Right-wing smear campaigns sometimes make a candidate more palatable to Democrats, isn’t that what they always say?
Dan
“Crazy” should run the gamut politically. Just because you are crazy it doesn’t mean that you would align yourself with the Right Wing. Although the opposite isn’t true.
So, either a portion of liberals are also crazy (which I believe), so the % of actual crazy people could be closer to 40%, maybe?
And/Or the factors compelling these people to vote RW go beyond just craziness. Meanness. Stupidity. Racism. Greed. Dickishness.
You let them off the hook when you call them crazy.
Laertes
@Trinity:
I can’t explain Taitz’ 26%, but I can tell you exactly who Keyes’ 27% are: Anti-abortion conservatives.
Keyes may have been crazy as a shithouse rat, but he was anti-abortion and Obama wasn’t. If that’s your #1 issue, and for a bunch of people it is, then you’ll vote for Keyes.
Take the portion of the public that’ll vote for the guy who’s with them on their #1 issue no matter how otherwise unsuitable he is. Add to them the ones who weren’t following the race closely enough to know that Keyes was crazy and just voted for Their Party. You’ll get to 27% easily enough.
Dave S.
Slightly OT but I liked the reference in that discussion to the expendability of Al Qaeda #3s. The more things change…
EconWatcher
I keep saying it: Never, never, never cheer for the crazies on the other side on the theory that they can’t win. On the right day, they can.
bkny
that crazyfication number just does.not.change.
amazing.
JGabriel
@Trinity:
They are the people who protest Harry Potter and Catcher In The Rye in libraries. They think Obama is a crypto-Muslim born in Kenya. They are anti-semitic but pro-Israel (because the Rapture!). They are the people who will be sad when Dick Cheney dies. They support torture – because the Constitution is not a suicide pact! They support AZ, because anyone who looks foreign is guilty until proven innocent.
They are the people our national media calls: Real Americans(tm).
.
Bill E Pilgrim
@feebog: I think the joke is that he’s not, actually certifiably crazy and she really literally is, so the idea that his party liked him by that much less than her party liked her is pretty amusing.
Well, to me it is anyway.
matoko_chan
Cole, the 27% is mostly rightwingers.
They are mostly insane…..I just got all my comments deleted from this post for saying EXACTLY the same thing i got linked at NRO for saying 2 years ago.
this was precious.
i jumped, and the GOP/TPM has become the epitome of ideological purity.
mirabile dictu!
malraux
@slag: Well, remember that voters are a somewhat biased sample of the whole population. If the crazies are more likely to vote, then the 27% could really be closer to 10% or so of the general population. Still it is a staggering number.
That said, I might have voted for oily tits just for the lolz if I had been in CA.
JGabriel
feebog:
Tyrone (quoted at top):
Yep, there’s seems to be some consistency here. Perhaps we need a corrolary, which I’ll hereby call the Feebog/Gabriel Corrolary to the Rogers Crazification Factor: Within the 27% Crazified, the ratio of Republicans to Democrats is roughly 5 to 1, or 83.33%.
.
LD50
The 5% of Democrats voting for Keyes is probably attributable to Obama’s scary terrorist name, which is a factor that Tyrone & John overlooked.
Glenn
Apples-and-oranges objections aside, the fact that Taitz got 4 times the number of votes as Kaus makes me deliriously happy.
JGabriel
malraux:
But they aren’t. You forget that many of them are institutionalized, or too paranoid to register to vote, or too busy following UFO’s, or otherwise incapacitated from, or disinterested in, voting.
.
Face
Kaus ran as a Democrat?
/jaw hits floor
Xenos
@Trinity:
This country is not to be confused with Lake Woebegone, where all the children are above average.
In any case, Palin’s support is not monolithic. You have the Christian fundamentalists, the free-market fundamentalists, the second-amendment fundamentalists. She has this great schtick where whatever your fundamentalism, she will go out and deny the existence of all those awkward facts that undermine that fundamentalism.
Of course some people love her. If we did not have a political system that structurally obliges the politicians to form two competing parties we would not have to worry about such loonies taking a slim majority in a party that forms a slim majority overall. But Bush proved that sometimes 27% is all you need.
Balconesfault
@feebog: As you noted – this was 27% of the Republican Primary for Taitz.
That makes it surprisingly low, actually.
And note that Obama had the scariest name in the Keyes-Obama race … while “Orly Taitz” is a scarier name than “Damon Dunn”.
Keith
Neither Alan Keyes nor Orly Taitz *look* crazy. Well, Taitz looks kind of quirky-crazy. But Kaus looks *demented* crazy. Like Stauf-from-7th-Guest-crazy.
satby
@LD50:
No John Rogers wrote that essay way before the “terrorist name” meme ever got a start, and Obama was pretty well known as a state legislator in IL.
And I agree, no one quite slams a homer on politics like Rogers, I keep a list of the urls of his greatest hits to send to people when I quote him.
Sidney J. Harris long ago wrote a column about the 1/4 of people you meet that are basically mentally ill, and how they shouldn’t ruin your day; I can’t find an online cite but it’s in the book “Pieces of Eight” (great book BTW). I’m struck by how the percentages always come out to be around 25%.
JGabriel
@Balconesfault:
Are you sure about that?
Damon Dunn sounds awfully close to “Damien (music cue: Da-Dunn-Dunn) !”
.
Frankie T.
“I think you have to assume a 27% Crazification Factor in any population.”
Hence the brilliance of California’s Prop 13 back in the 70’s, which wrote a supermajority vote requirement into the state constitution for raising property taxes. Howard Jarvis and Paul Gann, the authors of the bill, were self-interested cranks who knew they could count on the Crazification vote. Picking up the remaining 7% in California to defeat a tax hike for nearly anything except more prisons is relatively easy if you saturate the television market with sleazy ads.
Laertes
To put Keyes in perspective:
Candidate Smith is a raving loon. She’s always saying crazy shit to reporters. She claims to have been “inducted” by aliens. Three times. She once did time on a drug charge, and has been in and out of rehab a few times. If she’s not reading a prepared statement, she’s about as coherent as a drunk Sarah Palin. One gets the impression that she’s trying, in her fumbling way, to express boilerplate liberalism.
Candidate Jones is young, good-looking, smooth, and obviously whip-smart. She’s conservative enough to annoy a liberal, but still on the less-conservative wing of her party. She’s got a thorough command of the issues of the day, plus a few things that aren’t yet on anyone else’s radar, and can forcefully and clearly argue a coherent position on any of them.
And Jones supports torture. She’s not the poster-girl for torture. It’s not her signature issue in the way it is for others in her party, but when pressed she’ll support it, and her voting record demonstrates her commitment.
Smith, however, achieves moments of clarity when discussing torture. She’s against it, loudly and proudly, and is obviously viscerally disgusted at the very idea. When she’s not talking about aliens or dishing up some babble about how she knows the oil industry because she can see a gas station from her house and she once vacationed in Monaco, she’s speaking forcefully and clearly about the fundamental evil of torture and the need for governments to respect human dignity even in our worst enemies. She’s dumb as a stick, but you believe she means it.
Are you sure you wouldn’t vote for Smith?
LD50
@satby:
I’m not buying it. I can totally believe that 5% of Illinois democrats (mostly downstate, I bet) hadn’t heard of Obama and just couldn’t fucking handle the weird Ay-rab name. Obama’s name sounded alien well before the GOP started paying attention to him.
mcd410x
@Emma:
This is the same kind of thing that happens with soccer hooligans. In lean times, it’s not that there’s more hooligans, it’s just that the sane fans who usually drown them out have headed for greener pastures.
Gus
So how come Mickey Kaus got a fawning profile in the NY Times, but I’ve never heard of Brian Quintana who got nearly 3x the votes the goat blower did? Could it be because he’s a member of the fraternity?
satby
@LD50:
Well, you’d be wrong. It was’t the name, it was the blackity-blackness. Though both were black, that was a protest vote for putting up a black guy they knew would win.
And honestly, it was surprising that the 5% of Democrats was so low, there’s way more than 5% racists.
It’s a tribute to the old Boss’s machine: when they say “it’s this guy”, it’s gonna be this guy.
Besides, before a lot of the people just thought it was an “African” name, like Jaquanda or something.
LD50
Wow. In contrast to how it looked last night, it now looks like all the really crazy pernicious ballot props in CA failed, except for that ‘Jungle Primary’ one. And god knows what effect that will actually end up having.
Normally my voting ‘yes’ on a proposition is the kiss of death, or voting ‘no’ on it ensures its passage. Nice change of pace.
I think more CA voters are just voting ‘no’ on most props as a matter of course.
LD50
@satby: So….. 5% of Illinois Democrats were pissed at the nomination of a black person, and so in protest they… voted for a black person.
I would love to hear why that’s more plausible than people being put off by a foreign-sounding name.
IndieTarheel
@Xenos:
These days, I feel as though George Carlin got the demo right.
Matt in HB
LOL, that’s some obscure shit right there. I remember thinking the video cut-scenes from that game being just orders of magnitude better than anything else at the time. But I still quit in frustration after just a few hours.
Jeff R.
@Lynn:
In 2002, John Kerry ran for re-election to the Senate in Massachusetts. The Republicans did not run a candidate. The Libertarian candidate was Michael Cloud, a virtual unknown, notable only as the spouse of the Libertarian Party’s slightly more visible gubernatorial candidate. Kerry got 80%; Cloud, 18.4%. So, good guess Lynn.
Laertes
This.
I do. On every single ballot initiative, I start out firmly in the “no” camp and need a very good reason to shift.
Because I’m a political guy, sometimes my friends ask me for advice about this stuff. I’ll give my opinion of the initiative they’re asking about, but I always finish with “If you aren’t sure, just vote no. On everything. You mostly won’t go wrong.”
Punchy
OT
Considering it’s already June, I smell another Friedman Unit in full effezz’ect.
Of course, he’ll repeat the exact same statement in February ’11, too, so WTFC.
Chris G.
Just because they’re crazy doesn’t mean they don’t have SOME standards.
The Other Chuck
PG&E spent 48 million bucks on prop 16. The opposition spent about a hundred grand. Prop 16 went down. This is the first good news I’ve read in a long time. Then I hear that the “Jungle Primary” passed, which is just lovely. Look forward to races of nothing but two mega-millionaire candidates from now on.
Still, in the meantime I’m kind of eagerly looking forward to watching Meg Whitman blow her entire fortune. Fiorina seems to have a little better control over her burn rate, if not her demon sheep.
Laertes
@LD50:
You’re right. It wasn’t because of racism. The foreign-sounding name probably turned a Democrat or two. I imagine the two biggest factors were abortion (there are anti-abortion Democrats) and Chicago. I’ll bet you that all but a few of those 5% of Democrats who voted for Keyes are from downstate. If you haven’t lived both in Chicago and downstate Illinois it’s hard to understand just how deep that divide is.
Obama was from Chicago. Keyes wasn’t. That’ll peel off a few votes, even from Democrats.
Allan
I would like to thank the California Republican Party for running an African-American man against Orly Taitz.
That made this outcome all the more schadenfreudelicious.
Even in the heart of Obama Derangement Syndrome that is Orly’s home turf of Orange County, she earned only 28% of the vote from the California Raisins. *
(A California Raisin is a Caucasian senior citizen whose leathery sun-damaged, age-spotted skin is actually darker than that of many of the minorities they devote their days to hating.)
Barry
@slag: ” So, at least 1 in 4 people in this country are head-trauma crazy?”
I was at some family events in May, spending some time with some cousins and their families. They are all *very* high-functioning people. They all believe Fox News, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin. They will recite any item of right-wing propaganda like they believe it – and that’s *because* they believe it.
This is *after* 8 years of Dubya f*cking the country.
Remember that after Dubya & Co spent 2008 reaching for the basement floor and digging down even further, 47% of the votes for the president were cast for McCain.
I’d put the crazification factor at 40%.
LD50
Okay, I just came up with another possible explanation for this 5%.
I’ve noticed when you read all the way to the bottom of the fine print on election results, they always tell you what percentage of Republicans voted for the Democrat, and what percentage of Democrats voted for the Republican. There’s ALWAYS a certain residue on both sides of people who, for whateverthefuck the reason, did not vote with the party they claim to belong to. Couple that with people who couldn’t abide the raghead name a few years after 9/11, and people who just got confused in the voting booth, and bingo, that’s Keyes’ 5% of the Dems, right there.
Hell, there were several thousand BLACK DEMOCRATS in America in 2008 who voted for McCain. There’s all kinds of perverse shit around the edges.
Frank L
Dave S @27
The Al Qaeda #3’s are the equivalent of the guys in red shirts on Star Trek
J Gabriel @30
A minister friend of mine used to say about the Harry Potter protesters, “Harry Potter is to witchcraft as the Flintstones are to anthropology”
LD50
@Allan:
Dunn is an African-American Republican? Didn’t know that.
Okay, that means that Bowen has nothing to worry about.
satby
@LD50: doofus, they were voting against the party, not for Keynes per se.
Chinn Romney
I don’t have satellite radio, are we sure Howard Stern isn’t behind the Orly vote?
El Cid
@Frank L: I’m assuming that being promoted to “Al Qa’ida #3” is what happens to guys they don’t like.
Martin
@LD50: They are. Voters are starting to figure out that our budget woes are really our fault.
The only thing we should be allowed to vote on are changes to the electoral process, because putting that in the hands of the people motivated to make the process as favorable to incumbents or their party is way too fox guarding the hen house.
So, I’m okay with Props 14 and 15 being on the ballot and voted decisively on them, but the others are always a reflexive ‘no’, no matter how appealing they might be to me personally.
handy
@Martin:
I’m still amazed 16 and 17 didn’t pass. I saw zero “No” ads for either of these props, and the “Yes” ones were seeming to hit all the right buttons. I imagine in any “normal” political climate we would have had a different outcome last night.
KG
I’m just reminded of this exchange from Southpark:
Cartman: Oh really? Well did you know that over one-fourth of people in America think that 9/11 was a conspiracy? Are you saying that one-fourth of Americans are retards?
Kyle: Yes. I’m saying one-fourth of Americans are retards.
Stan: Yeah, at least one-fourth.
Kyle: Let’s take a test sample: There’s four of us, you’re a retard, that’s one-fourth.
Another example from California’s election yesterday: one of the ballot measures would allow property owners to do major earthquake retrofitting (something that older buildings often need) without getting hit with a reassessment on their property taxes. Nearly 20% voted no, which I simply don’t understand. I’m generally a “when in doubt vote no” type person, but this one seemed like a no brainer, which takes us back to the 25% question.
LD50
@satby: It still doesn’t make sense, even as a statement of incoherent anger. Sorry.
daverave
I told the reluctantly registered Republican wife to cast a vote for Orly to hopefully raise the crazy quotient, alas, it was for naught.
jl
Only sad thing I can think of about the surprising Kaus defeat is that a few goats were looking to make a bundle off the exposes they had ready for the media. That won’t happen now.
LD50
@KG:
Yeah, even the people who put the voter info pamphlet together couldn’t scrounge anyone to argue against that one. And there’s always at least one loony available to take the contrarian position on ANY proposition.
I attribute the 20% ‘no’ on that one to the ‘just vote no on everything’ crowd.
Glenn
@KG:
Not to argue with a cartoon, but, you know, 9/11 was a conspiracy. Maybe not a CONSPIRACY!, but it was sure a conspiracy.
LD50
Can someone explain to me this ‘Mickey Kaus’/’goat’ meme? Somehow I missed it when it first made the rounds.
kay
You guys laugh, but the crazy base runs the Republican Party.
It doesn’t matter if members of the crazy base are actually elected.
No one denounced Orly, nor will they. She’ll be a trusted consultant, and they will never ever admit she’s a dangerous lunatic, because there goes the 25%.
The Bush Administration wasn’t a one-off. They kowtow to these people because they have to.
It should scare the shit out of us that Orly garnered 25%. If the Republican wins, he owes his win to having persuaded her faction to come over to his side, and they’re not compromising.
Redshirt
@Frank L: I resemble that remark! We’re far less significant than the mighty Al Qaeda number 3.
trollhattan
@Face:
Ah-yep, and GoatBoy(tm) came in third, gathering fewer votes than someone who had zero publicity–Brian Quintana (who?!?).
Let’s roll the tape on what Kaus thinks a modern Democrat ought to be tackling:
Mind you, this was part of his gracious (cough) concession. I guess the Calif. Dems “just don’t get it.” Damn illegal alien unions.
Svensker
@Punchy:
LOL.
Barry
@satby: The whole point is that no matter how f*cked up a candidate is, he/she would get some votes. And Keyes is f*cked up.
Svensker
@kay:
Hell, Michelle Bachmann appeared with her at some shindig recently. Course MB is certifiable, too, but she is elected and “respectable.”
trollhattan
A Whitman sampler:
Personal money spend on primary: $71 million.
Votes received (as of this a.m. per Secretary of State): 1.1 million.
Meggers has spent about $64.50 per vote. This doesn’t count the additional $16 mil of other funds spent by her campaign. I hope Jerry’s been eating his Wheaties.
Doctor Science
I disagree about the 27% being a “crazy” factor. I think that’s rock-ribbed tribalism, not “crazy” in the usual sense. In the canonical case, they voted for Keynes because he was Their Tribe — and probably because Their Tribe is defined by abortion.
Voting for the crazy dude who is in your tribe is not at all the same thing as voting crazily. Among other things, you may rightly calculate that Crazy Dude is more likely than Other Guy to help you get a job, or a permit, or a grant, or whatever else you may need from the government.
EconWatcher
trollhattan:
Well, I appreciated the pun about the “Whitman sampler,” even if no one else did.
danimal
The latest numbers from the CA Secretary of State have Taitz winning not 25%, but, you guessed it, 27% of the vote. It’s beautiful.
Prop 16, despite a 500 to 1 spending advantage by the Yes folks, was defeated. Not a bad day in CA.
danimal
Oh crap, forget the last post. I was looking at one county’s results, not the state results, which still have Orly at 25%.
LD50
@danimal: Even the bond issue to keep our local school buildings from collapsing passed. Can’t believe the Norquist types didn’t sink it.
News, McCain, great, etc.
swbarnes2
No, Orly didn’t get 25% of all the vote; she wasn’t on all the ballots. She was only on Republican ballots, and Nonpartisan Republican ballots. Voters registered as Nonpartisan can choose a Democratic NP ballot, a Republican NP ballot, or a straight NP ballot with neither. The Republican NP ballot would not have the candidates for the local central Republican committee, but it would have the primaries for the offices, like Governor and Secretary of State. So people registered as Democrats, or registered with minor parties, like Libertarians, could not have voted for or against her even if they wanted.
So if 27% of the total electorate is crazy, I suspect that more than 27% of Republicans are crazy. So she failed to secure a lot of the crazies.
I’ve been a poll Worker in CA for a few years, and I worked yesterday’s election.
Spike The Cat
I’m beginning to wonder if there isn’t a genetic condition we could call “batshit crazy.” It might, like sexual preference, be linked to several interacting alleles that have partial penetration. Someone with the genetic makeup would, then, have a higher than normal probability of ending up “BSC” and we end up seeing it in approximately one quarter of those who survive to adulthood (chronologically speaking). Kind of like how same-sex preference ends up in roughly 4% to 8% of the adult population.
New Yorker
Once again, I have to go back to the South Park 9/11 Truther epsiode:
Cartman: Did you know that 1/4 of Americans believe 9/11 was an inside job? Are you saying that 1/4 of Americans are retarded?
Kyle: Yes, I’m saying that 1/4 of Americans are retarded!
Stan: At least 1/4.
And Orly Taitz ended up with 25.7% of the vote. Interesting.
IndieTarheel
@Allan:
If this ain’t in the lexicon, it oughta be.
LikeableInMyOwnWay
There is a 25-30% crazy factor in American politics and always has been.
The question is, what do the other 70% do about it? Because without a coalition with some percentage of those other people, the 25% is impotent.
Well, one response is to support democracy. Support good candidates, participate, remind people that as long as we outnumber the idiots at the polls we can accomplish a lot.
Another response is to take the snarky, cynical view that everything is just shit and the country is doomed. Or you could run a blog and tell a whole state, which has its standard 25% crazy population, to fuck off and die for the actions of a few idiots. You constantly whine and bitch and tell everyone that “we’re all fucked” because actually doing anything useful is just too damned hard.
This is what it looks like when the 70% fight back. This is what democracy in action can actually do … push back against the morons.
wmd
I voted for Orly.
Not because I’m crazy or think she’s a good candidate, rather to possibly have Whitman and Fiorina have her on the general election ballot with them.
Ed Drone
@Trinity:
Does the phrase, “some of the people all of the time” mean anything to you?
Ed
Lysana
@handy:
When people found out thanks to word of mouth that 16 and 17 were funded by the people who’d benefit most from them, that news traveled fast. I think the Internet gets credit for taking care of business there, at least in part. I know I was aware pretty quickly who was behind those after they were announced.
Jeff
On the other hand, it looks like he has the goat vote
Platonicspoof
@LD50:
It may have started as a simple case of mistaken identification at the species level.
BruinKid
Um, John, you notice what you just did? Tyrone specifically marveled at how 5% of Illinois Democrats were crazy enough to vote for Keyes.
Then you said 5% of California Democrats voted for Kaus.
Doesn’t it stand to reason that we can formulate the hypothesis that 5% of Democrats are batshit insane?
Note, however, that Taitz only got about 26% in a GOP primary. The original post was talking about the crazification factor in the general population, not just among the GOP. Keyes got 27% of the OVERALL vote in Illinois. The exit polls showed that among Republicans, Keyes actually got a whopping 56% of the vote! Over HALF of Illinois Republicans, when faced with a legitimate candidate of a different party, and a batshit head-trauma insane candidate of their own party, still voted for the batshit insane candidate.
In that sense, the California GOP came out looking much more sane than the Illinois GOP.
I still agree about the 27% crazification factor in the general population, though.
tammanycall
@LD50:
The meme originates from Yglesias and Atrios. It was a response to way Kaus covered the rumors of the Edwards/Hunter affair.