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By Root 862 0

Amendment—by a Congress of which Jefferson was not a member, incidentally. He was writing to the Danbury Baptists, who happened to be living in a place where Congregationalism was at that moment the established state religion of Connecticut. But neither Jefferson nor the Baptists objected to that. (The Baptists objected to the dancing—but that’s another story.) Their dispute was about the federal government’s involvement in religion. Even Jefferson’s “wall of separation between church and state” letter referred only to the federal government and assumed states could have established religions.

The invincibly ignorant eye-rolling from the students and professors at the University of Delaware at the O’Donnell-Coons debate suggests that American history is not really touched on by our educational system. I thought they just took the Bible out of public schools, but apparently the history books have been removed as well.

As with the liberals who agreed with one another that Sarah Palin was a moron for mentioning “1773” to a group of Tea Partiers, liberals cited the audible snickers of morons at the O’Donnell-Coons debate as proof that O’Donnell was wrong.

These people would have snickered at Galileo. They would giggle if you told them the millennium didn’t start on January 1, 2000. They would sneer if you told them Albany is the capital of New York. But you’d be right. It doesn’t matter if 99.99999 percent of the people listening to O’Donnell think she’s wrong. She’s right.

But that’s not how a mob distinguishes truth from falsehood. They defer to the crowd. Some students say 2 + 2 = 4, some say it’s 5—let’s have a vote!

As Le Bon says, a mob will believe its own myths even though they “most often have only a very distant relation with the observed fact.”8

The media have reveled in the one myth believed by more Republicans than Democrats: that Obama was not born in Hawaii, despite printed announcements of his birth that ran in Hawaii newspapers at the time, among other evidence. Congratulations, liberals! I’ve got dozens of myths believed by more Democrats than Republicans.

Which party contained the collection of idiots who believed:

• Sarah Palin’s infant child, Trig, was actually the child of her daughter.

• The Rosenbergs were innocent.

• The conviction of spectacularly guilty Mumia Abu Jamal, arrested while literally holding a smoking gun over the body of the cop he had just shot, was a frame-up.

• Alar on apples causes cancer.

• Power lines cause cancer.

• 150,000 women die of anorexia every year.

• Domestic violence against pregnant women is the leading cause of birth defects.

• Global cooling (circa 1976).

• Global warming (circa 2000).

• The Duke lacrosse players gang-raped a stripper.

• There is a “plastic gun”—that shoots bullets—invisible to metal detectors.

• Emergency room admissions for women beaten by their husbands rise 40 percent on Super Bowl Sundays.

• Justice Antonin Scalia threw the 2000 election to Bush so that his son could get a job with the Labor Department.

• Breast implants cause disease.

• O.J. was innocent.

• Dan Rather had documents proving Bush shirked his National Guard duty. (Hint: Rachel Maddow was one!)

• The Diebold Corporation secretly stole 700,000 Kerry votes in 2004.

• Bill Clinton did not have sex with “that woman.”

• Al Gore didn’t realize he was in a Buddhist temple.

• Heterosexuals are just as likely to contract AIDS as gays.

• Jim Jones was not a sociopathic cult leader but an inspirational visionary in the mold of “Martin King, Angela Davis, Albert Einstein, Chairman Mao” (as put by California Democrat Willie Brown).

• John Edwards didn’t have an affair with Rielle Hunter.

• John Edwards’s campaign aide Andrew Young fathered Rielle Hunter’s child.

• Tawana Brawley was raped by policemen and a prosecutor.

• Someone shouted “Kill him!” at the mention of Obama at a Sarah Palin rally in 2008.

• A census worker found dead in the woods of Kentucky with “Fed” painted on his chest was murdered by a right-wing