Obama Options

[Tung]

I know this might be old, but I just heard about it. Obama's not a US born citizen, yet why was he eligible to run for President? Wasn't one of the rules to run was to be a natural born US citizen? Someone told me, there was some cover up and conspiracy about how he faked his birth certificate and how he was born in Hawaii or something.

[*paperplane*]

Maybe you're not, but that site pretty much is. To be fair, I'd only watched half the video when I posted that response; I've since finished it and watched the Fox News clip. It doesn't matter where they were; if those were the best informed people they could find, they didn't try hard enough. It would not have helped their cause to tape people who were actually well-informed. I could answer the vast majority of those questions (admittedly, I knew nothing of that coal industry remark, but I fully intend to research it).

They didn't show that clip about the 57 states in its entirety; it seems fairly obvious that he misspoke and meant 47 states. He'd visited 47 states, had one more to go, and wasn't visiting Alaska or Hawaii. 47 + 3 = 50. I'm not trying to blindly defend here, but good god, you can't have a video on how the media misrepresented things and then do it yourself. Same for the Russia question: he was asking multiple choice questions, with the choices being Biden, McCain, Obama, or Palin. Not Sarah Palin vs Tina Fey. SNL is a comedy show, and has no obligation to present accurate news. But of those four choices, Palin was by far the most correct. If "I can see Russia from my house" were that far a cry from "we're very close to Russia," it would not have made a good joke to begin with. So I absolutely do not think anyone can be faulted for thinking Palin said that; it was a trick question. If this guy has to result to asking trick questions to make people look dumb, he probably does not have a very strong argument to begin with.

But anyway, I don't think it's the media's fault that people don't bother to read comprehensively. All of those things were shown on tv, or printed in the papers. It's not like the headlines consisted of SARAH PALIN SAYS SOMETHING DUMB AGAIN and never mention the fact that Nancy Pelosi is speaker of the hour. For f*ck's sake. Those people were not "informed Obama supporters," they were "informed partisans" at best, as they clearly chose to ignore every piece of information that did not suit their interests. If all you watch is the Daily Show...yeah, you're not going to get a particularly well-rounded view of the political environment. However, the same goes for people who watch Hannity or O'Reilly.