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July 27, 2012 11:26 AM “Obama Is Muslim” Meme Rising Among Republicans

By Ed Kilgore

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Generally speaking, when politicians become better known, completely erroneous assumptions about their background and identity decline. But not if you are a Republican, and the politician in question is Barack Obama.

A new religion-and-politics poll from Pew shows the percentage of Republicans who say the president is a Muslim has risen from 16 percent in October of 2008 to 30 percent today. Among self-identified “conservative Republicans,” those subscribing to the Muslim Meme is all the way up to 34%.

I suppose it’s possible that if Pew asked these folk if Obama was a Zoroastrian, an Animist, or a devil-worshiper, the numbers would be similar. Anything that sounds vaguely bad sounds vaguely good as a description for Barack Obama. This is another reason that if the president manages to get re-elected, we’ll need to send out the grief counselors to the deepest red parts of the country, and continue Mitt Romney’s Secret Service protection.

Ed Kilgore is a contributing writer to the Washington Monthly. He is managing editor for The Democratic Strategist and a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute. Find him on Twitter: @ed_kilgore.
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Comments

  • davidp on July 27, 2012 11:33 AM:

    I wonder what the response would be if these folks were asked if Obama was a communist.

  • Equal Opportunity Cynic on July 27, 2012 11:44 AM:

    I wonder what the response would be if they'd made up a ridiculous name for a sect. "Do you believe the President is actually a Methusalean?"

  • schtick on July 27, 2012 11:44 AM:

    What do expect from people that have an IQ that borders on plantlife? And the fact that the tealiban promote it always helps, too.


    crapcha....eskilld African....just wow.

  • Impishparrot on July 27, 2012 11:46 AM:

    Last I read, there was NO religious test for the office of the President of the United States of America. Has something changed?

  • Zorro on July 27, 2012 11:51 AM:

    ""Well, you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim." Well, the correct answer is, he is not a Muslim; he's a Christian. He's always been a Christian.

    But the really right answer is, "What if he is?" Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer's no, that's not America. Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she could be president? Yet, I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion, "He's a Muslim and he might be associated [with] terrorists." This is not the way we should be doing it in America."

    - General Colin Powell

  • Joe Friday on July 27, 2012 11:52 AM:

    "Obama Is Muslim Meme Rising Among Republicans"

    Obviously because they can no longer publicly use the "N" word.

  • jim filyaw on July 27, 2012 12:05 PM:

    after spending their career in the pulpit damning mormons as heretics and cultists (that con artist, jeffress of fbc, dallas for instance), the fundy preachers have got to give the dimwits in the pews some plausible reason for voting for one.

  • T2 on July 27, 2012 12:11 PM:

    I guess another way to look at it is - 2/3 of Republicans don't think he's a Muslim. For a group as deranged as conservative Republicans, that's pretty good, I think.

  • Peter C on July 27, 2012 12:32 PM:

    Willful self-delusion is the sort of characteristic which should disqualify anyone from Government. So, EVERY Republican running for office should be asked whether they think Obama is a Muslim. Whatever they answer should be widely publicized so that normal people can punish the panderers and the self-deluded while the base can punish the apostates.

    This is why FOX is so poisonous for our society. It is so sad that we allow the nurturing of the delusions of the willfully ignorant. Any political party who depends upon such a strategy cannot be regarded as legitimate.

  • Hedda Peraz on July 27, 2012 12:37 PM:

    These are the same folks who still root for the Brooklyn Dodgers.

  • bluestatedon on July 27, 2012 12:47 PM:

    I will bet $10,000 of Mitt Romney's money that at least 90% of the GOPers who believe Obama is a Muslim also believe that Adam and Eve had completely-vegetarian dinosaurs for neighbors in the Garden of Eden 5,000 years ago.

    In other words, the percentage of Republicans who are the nuttiest, most ignorant, most jaw-droppingly stupid are also Evangelical Christianists who believe that the Bible is the literal truth.

    In still other words, the Republican Party has essentially become a theocratic party whose dominant faction at the electoral level believe that the Bible should take precedence over the Constitution in governing the United States.

  • Perspecticus on July 27, 2012 12:52 PM:

    Each time I see a story like this I am reminded that discussions of Challenger Romney's Mormon cult are considered unseemly.

  • RT on July 27, 2012 1:01 PM:

    "after spending their career in the pulpit damning mormons as heretics and cultists (that con artist, jeffress of fbc, dallas for instance), the fundy preachers have got to give the dimwits in the pews some plausible reason for voting for one."

    It reminds me of Churchill's quote about his newfound pragmatic support of Stalin: "If Hitler invaded Hell, I would at least make a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons."

  • RT on July 27, 2012 1:04 PM:

    Anyone think an unnamed Romney aide will say in Israel that Obama doesn't understand America's Judeo-Christian heritage?

  • Mitch on July 27, 2012 1:08 PM:

    @bluestatedon

    You are totally correct. There's nothing wrong with religion, but Fundamentalism (of any kind) is dangerous. And, in my experience growing up in the Bible Belt, people who have a strong belief in Biblical Literalism are almost always absolute rubes. They are usually very, very gullible.

    There's a reason for this IMHO.

    They base their world view on faith alone, and the comforting words of another (the preacher or other believers) instead of seeking answers - and formulating questions - on their own. Heck, most of them believe that questioning their belief is itself a horrible sin. So they never learn critical thinking, and their "BS-detector" atrophies.

  • DisgustedWithItAll on July 27, 2012 1:11 PM:

    Fox.

  • Rick B on July 27, 2012 1:18 PM:

    @Impishparrot - you are correct. The founders wrote in the constitution that there would be no religious text for political office. "Historian" and minister David Barton has carefully and repeatedly explained that the founders wrote those words to mean that the President can be any kind of protestant evangelical christian he wants to be.

    There has been no change - just Barton's xtian rewrite of history replacing modern lies with true godly history. Once the rewrite is accepted and modern history is suppressed by the xtians like Michelle Bachman (another Oral Roberts University graduate) it will be clear that nothing has changed from the past.

    @Joe Friday - Exactly right.

    @jim filyaw - The evangelical idea that one particular denomination is right and all others are wrong is a tool used by people like the Koch brothers to divide and conquer the mass population. People spend their time, energy and resources fighting members of other denomination or races or ethnic groups (all socially created labels) instead of recognizing that the wealthy predators like the Koch brothers are stealing everyone else blind. The socially created distinction between the races was and still is used to split workers and get them fighting each other. The overlords give preference to whites so that they will feel they are losing something if they are forced to accept blacks as their equals. That's called the "psychological wage" of being white.

    It works with religions, too. The Southern Baptists and Methodists have been the strong supporters of the White overlords like Jim DeMint and until recently the Catholics and the Mormons were excluded from this. But now it's like the European Communists in the late 30's - the Comintern in the USSR ordered a change in policy and overnight the policy was changed across Europe. It was never after that recognized that the policy had been different.

    The whole thing about "Obama as a Muslim" is exactly this kind of effort by the wealthy predators who run today's conservative Republican Party to get Americans to fight each other over irrelevancies like religion while the wealthy predators steal the nation blind and live like aristocrats and kings on the backs of the people who create the real value in this nation.

  • Rick B on July 27, 2012 1:58 PM:

    @Peter C - willful self-delusion among conservatives is encouraged and rewarded by their predator leaders. It's one of the techniques used by corporate funders to create authoritarian fascist armies of "true believers" to go fight for the wealthy predators.

    The conservative think tanks exist to create such usable memes. Especially the CATO instituted (Libertarians by the Koch Brothers) and the Discovery Institute (Intelligent Design by some wealthy fundamentalists.) American Enterprise Institute is a long-time libertarian conservative organization doing the same thing. The conservative Southern Baptists took over all the Southern Baptist Seminaries for the same reason. FOX and Clear Channel Radio are secular propaganda outlets to be used by the actors in those propaganda mills. Pat Robertson's TV network does the same thing for fundamentalist whack jobs.

    The purpose of all of these institutions is to give the conservatives power. As we can see from Romney's campaign, they will say anything to get the votes that put them into office, but like the tea party congressperson who ran on opposing the bailout and creating jobs, when elected they just want to pass laws to stop abortions or some such social idiocy and cut taxes on their financial predator masters.

    America suffers with a vast set of these conservative political institutions intended to mislead, confuse, and lie to the public.

    None of those ideas are all that important. The conservatives create them in their institutes, think tanks and seminaries and throw them to the masses to fight over while the conservative predators gather power to themselves and steal as much as they can from society.

    7th try with Capcha. I especially hate it when half the thing is off the screen.

  • j on July 27, 2012 2:00 PM:

    Remember when the conservatives spent a super long time mocking Obama's work as a community organizer, they neglected to mention that his work was primarily with the Catholic church.

  • Steve P on July 27, 2012 8:17 PM:

    Should have included a control question: "Do you think that Mormons are Christians?"
    Some of those people have trouble with Episcopalians.

  • Lance on October 30, 2012 10:16 AM:

    It's the ol "actions speak louder than words" to all you incredulous Obama lovers.
    The guy wears a ring that says, "there is no god but Allah" in Arabic. What more proof do you need? His first speech as prez was over Arabic tv. The " 57 states of America" ? Confused that with the OIC. Apologies to Arab countries, Anti Israel........
    Appointing Muslims to government positions....... , bowing to Abdullah. "My Muslim faith" (slip"
    I have good reason to believe Barrack Hussain is a Muslim.