How Obama got elected

A quick quiz. Of the four major-party candidates in the recent presidential and vice-presidential election, which one:

1. Has a pregnant unmarried teenage daughter?
2. Committed plagiarism in a campaign speech?
3. Received a wardrobe worth over $150K from his or her political party?
4. Claimed to have campaigned in 57 of the United States?
5. Was unsure how many houses he or she owns?
6. Won his or her first election by having the opponents removed from the ballot?

I'm willing to bet that you had no trouble at all answering the odd-numbered questions and were less sure about the even-numbered ones.

Former talk-show host, author, and documentarian John Ziegler examines this phenomenon in his in-progress documentary "Media Malpractice: How Obama Got Elected"; see www.howobamagotelected.com for more details.

His hypothesis is that the media in general exhibited a bias in favor of Obama, made manifest by suppressing news harmful to the Obama ticket and emphasizing news harmful to the McCain ticket; his method was to survey 12 Obama voters on topics such as those above. The results are shocking but unsurprising.

Now, I'm a math nut, and I'll be the first to tell you that 12 people do not a statistically valid sample make. John Zogby did one better by duplicating the poll in a scientific manner, and came up with similar results concerning Obama voters:

Four of seven could not identify the party that controls Congress.
Five of seven did not know that Biden plagiarized in a campaign speech.
Five of six did not know that Obama had his opponents removed from the ballot.
Six of seven knew that Palin received the $150K worth of clothes.
Fifteen of sixteen knew that Palin has a pregnant teenage daughter.
Six of seven "knew" that Palin said she could see Russia from her house, even though it was actually Tina Fey of Saturday Night Live who said that.

The obvious conclusion is that Obama voters are ignorant about the world around them, but that's not it. The real conclusion is that those people who base their opinions on what mainstream media tells them are kept selectively ignorant by the media's own agenda.