First I must confess that I was reading Glenn Beck’s website. …I’ve done dumber things in my life. I just can’t think what they would be.

So, somewhere amid all the rancid piles of smegma that accumulate about his website, I stumbled across something called the Stu Blog, and in this Blog I found this wonderful little headline:

“The majority of people who believe Obama is a Muslim are not Republicans”

“Really?” I thought to myself. “I have to check this out!”

And thus I opened the article

The piece begins by talking about recent polls conducted in Alabama and Mississippi, polls showing (as Stu puts it) that; “a lot of Republicans in Alabama and Mississippi think President Barack Obama is a Muslim.” He faults Democrats and MSNBC for publicizing these polls. Stu dismisses these as biased polls and says we need a more neutral source on the issue. Next, he turns to a national poll conducted by Pew in 2010. Hence, we get the following paragraph:

Pew asked 2,811 people about Barack Obama’s religion. Approximately 536 of them incorrectly said he was a Muslim. Of those 536 people, 261 of them were Republicans, 275 were not. In other words, about 51% of those who believe Obama is Muslim are outside the Republican party.

So, you see, the title (piss-poor wording and all) is technically right. The Pew study does show that Republicans fail to constitute a majority of those believing President Obama is a Muslim.

But, I wonder, just what are the odds that any other political party has a higher representation?

None.

The poll results are right here.

Note that the highest percentage of people believing Obama is a Muslim are, according to that poll, conservative Republicans. Do they constitute a majority of the total population believing Obama is a Muslim? No.

So, if you add BOTH the Democrats who believe this to the independents who believe it, then those two together beat the Republicans by 14 people out of over 500. So one could not in fact say that Republicans constitute a majority of those believing Obama is a Muslim. One would have to be content to say that they are the largest group in that total population. But one could not say that they constituted a “majority.”

Which I suppose is the second most underwhelming fact of the day. The first being that Glenn Beck is a festering blood-fart. (Stu Burguiere is merely an emergent anal fistula.)

…and I really need to surf smarter corners of the net.

Photo by Gage Skidmore.