ROVE: Republicans had better be clear about this.We had a problem in the 1950s with the John Birch Society, and it took Bill Buckley standing up as a strong conservative and taking them on. Within our party, we've got to be very careful about allowing these people who are the birthers and the 9/11-deniers to get too high a profile and say too much without setting the record straight. O'REILLY: What percentage of Republican voters—5%, 10%? ROVE: I don't know, but whatever it is, it ought to be less, because we need the leaders of our party to say "Look, stop falling into the trap of the White House and focus on the real issues."

LAST week on Bill O'Reilly's show Karl Rove made a pseudo-laudable call for Republicans to distance themselves from birthers who believe, contrary to all evidence and the normal process of human day-to-day reasoning, that Barack Obama was born outside the United States. Of course Mr Rove didn't call for Republicans to do this because birtherism is wrong, paranoid, and tinged with nativist xenophobia and racial prejudice; he thinks they should do it in order to avoid Democratic "traps". Anyway, the subject of the discussion was the recent Public Policy Polling poll showing that 51% of likely Republican primary voters firmly believe that Mr Obama was born outside the United States. (Another 21% aren't sure.) That's up from 44% in August 2009. Here's the exchange:

To believe that only 5% or 10% of Republican voters are birthers, you have to believe that the PPP poll is wildly off-base. Put it this way: say only 30% of GOP primary voters were birthers. And say GOP primary voters are just 10% of the electorate, like they were in 2008 (even though they were depressed that year and will be fired up in 2012, which should mean they'll constitute more of the electorate). That's 3% of the electorate. Now, as of mid-2010, the percentage of the electorate that self-identifies as "Republican" or "lean Republican" was 40%. So you're already at 7.5% of Republican voters, and you're assuming no Republicans at all believe that Mr Obama was born outside the United States, except for the ones who vote in primaries. Basically, what you have to think, and what Messrs O'Reilly and Rove do in fact think, is that the PPP poll is just somehow off by a huge factor; Mr Rove offhandedly says "look, this is a terrible poll," as if that claim needs no substantiation.

Predictably, Messrs O'Reilly and Rove's efforts to dismiss the results of the PPP poll were strongly denounced over the weekend, though not by angry political scientists defending the integrity of their profession.

Whether you agree or not, the people who are pushing the eligibility issue are on our side. It is certainly counter-productive to deride them like liberals do. Recently a whole stream of Republicans have come out, at the prompting of the drive by media, to reassure us that Obama is a citizen and oh, yes, he is a Christian too... The RINOs turn their noses up at the people who want the answers, which, incidentally is 60% of Republican voters. They turn their noses up at the Tea Party movement.

Thus the inimitable prose stylings of Tea Party Nation. And, because it's just too good not to pass it on:

Yet, they do not take a moment to consider why this is important. If Barack Obama is proved to be ineligible to be President, everything he has done is wiped out. Obamacare is gone. The START treaty is gone. The liberal lunatics Obama has appointed to the Federal Judiciary, including the two he has put on the Supreme Court are gone. ...What are the chances of success? Who knows? Why do football teams run the flea flicker play? It does not work all of the time, but when it does, the results are spectacular. Why should conservatives all hope this works out? Because this wipes out almost everything the Obama regime has done. We get a do over.

We get a do over. Ay yay yay. You know, when I refer to this stuff in blog posts, people reliably tell me I shouldn't be paying attention to this kind of junk; it's nut-picking. I wish I could agree. This stuff is what's driving the American political conversation. This stuff is why, more likely than not, that PPP poll is accurate.