Politico’s Ben Smith notes something I’ve brought up several times in this space and had the opportunity to discuss once on MSNBC. People have made much of the surprising share of Republicans who will tell pollsters they buy into the fantasy that President Obama is really a foreigner in the Oval Office (a logical consequence of birther-ism).
But just a few years ago, you could get an equally, surprisingly large number of Democrats to tell pollsters they believed that George W. Bush either allowed 9-11 to happen, despite having foreknowledge, or else actually conspired to make it happen. Smith has crosstabs from a 2006 poll that show more than half of Democratic voters were supposedly truthers. (I think that pollsters overcount both birthers and truthers for the very reason Smith hints at:
