[1/09/09: Ziegler update here.]
I stumbled across the interview of John Ziegler by Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com regarding his “poll” of Obama supporters and their supposed knowledge of “major issues” that occurred during the campaign. After reading the interview transcript and looking through the poll results over on Zogby, I can only conclude that John Ziegler is an American Douche bag, a mendacious, dishonest, uninformed, and flat-out stupid douche bag.
Let us get this part out of the way right off the bat; John Ziegler, go fuck yourself!
His contention is that he tested Obama voters for their knowledge of “major issues” that occurred during the campaign. In reality it is a Republican Pop-Culture quiz, asking poorly conceived and in some cases false “questions”. The questions ranged from trivia (l): “Which candidate currently has a pregnant teenage daughter”, to the absurd/retarded: “Which candidate claimed to have campaigned in 57 states?”. Oh yes, those are both “major issues” which should be considered carefully when casting a presidential ballot! Just so you don’t think I’m cherry-picking to make Mr. Ziegler look like a fool (he needs NO help from me!), you can see the entire poll result here: Ziegler Election Test
I transcribed the poll result data to an Excel spreadsheet and the first thing that jumped out at me was that the population total for 7 of the 12 questions did NOT equal 512! I though that a professional polling organization such as Zogby should be able to execute a 12 question poll with a population size of 512 and come up with the same answer 12 times. I guessed wrong apparently. I don’t know what fancy-schmancy methods this big-time pollers use to add up columns of integers but it is clearly more sophisticated than the SUM function in Excel.
Moving on. I rescored the results using my own interpretation of the “correct” answer and came up with some not-so-surprising results.
First, the easy ones; question 202, which asked “Which candidate said that they could see Russia from their house?” Zieglers calculation was that 0% answered correctly, it was a trick question! That specific quote does actually belong to Tina Fey, but Ms. Palin made so many virtually identical statements from the stump that I’m going to give it to her! Such as when she said to Charlie Gibson “…you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska.”
Question 205 queried, “Which candidate won their first election by getting all of their opponents kicked off the ballot?” Ziegler claimed a 17.4% correct (Obama) while in reality the survey shows (again, those NONE and NS guys again!) that 70.5% answered correctly! The truth is that his opponents managed to fail to get on the ballot by not acquiring enough valid signatures.
Question 209 concerned the Republican meme that “Obama wants to bankrupt the coal industry.” Yeesh! Such a question! Where does this clown get this material? Oh, Newsbusters.org, Michele Malkin, rightpundits.org and that pinnacle of thoughtful and accurate punditry, stoptheaclu.com! Zieglers result showed that 81% of respondents got that one right! Unfortunately, the correct answer was only gotten by 15% of respondents, again, NS and None.
One last example is question number 211, the final question in the survey (I guess they wanted to leave a certain “taste” in their mouthes) which was, “Which candidate started their political career at the home of two former members of the Weather Underground?”. I’m pleased to report that almost 53% answered None or NS while Ziegler howled at the fact that only 44% answered Obama!
This was a fun exercise, but it all leads back to one fact; John Ziegler is an American Douche bag!
On a related note, I wished he’d asked me for questions to add to his poll, I’d have given him some good ones, some of which are even based on FACTS!
Which candidate divorced his first wife after she suffered a debilitating accident?
Which candidate dated his 2nd wife while still married to and living with his first wife?
Which candidate physically scuffled with a 92-year old Senator on the Senate floor?
Which candidate said “fuck you” to Sen. John Cornyn, called Sen. Pete Domenici an “asshole”, and referred to Sen. Charles Grassley as a “fucking jerk” (to his face)?
And some wingnutty style questions could include
Which candidate caused the deaths of 134 American Navy men in 1967?
Which candidate refuses to acknowledge involvement in a fatal drunk-driving incident in 1964?
Which candidate spent 5 ½ years in a communist camp chillin’ with his buds? (and how is it again that his captors figured out his father was an important admiral?)
Which candidate has shamelessly exploited his POW experience for political gain?
Somewhere Else Altogether 