Salon describes in chilling detail how effective the Big Lie has been in the USA. The Big Lie occurs when one a)allows a gross falsehood to be repeated or b)actively spreads the Big Lie. The GOP has been doing both a) and b). Here is the Salon details:

If you wonder why a desperate Mitt Romney rushed to lie about President Obama’s handling of crises in Cairo and Benghazi and make the ugly claim that Obama’s first response was “to sympathize with those who waged the attacks,” the latest poll from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life helps fill in the blanks.

Unbelievably, the poll finds that the percentage of Republicans who believe that Barack Obama is Muslim, not Christian, has doubled since October 2008. It was actually a little higher in August 2010, right before the GOP administered its midterm “shellacking.” But in the most recent Pew poll on the topic, in July 2012, an astonishing 34 percent of “conservative Republicans” and 30 percent of all Republicans described the president as Muslim….

How is it possible that almost four years after we elected Obama president, the number of Republicans who think he’s Muslim could double, and that less than half of all registered voters know what religion he professes (in a country where religion matters)? Oh, I don’t know. Maybe because virtually every Republican politician has either encouraged or tolerated the far-right lunatic fringe, from crackpot “birthers” who insist the president wasn’t born here, to Romney campaign surrogates like John Sununu who just last month insisted the president “needs to learn what it means to be an American.”

When House Speaker John Boehner dismissed evidence that a growing number of Republicans believe Obama was a Muslim, telling NBC’s David Gregory, “it’s not my job to tell the American people what to think”; when presidential candidate Rick Santorum refused to correct a supporter who called Obama “an avowed Muslim,” saying “the president’s a big boy, he can defend himself and his record”; when Romney likewise remained silent when an audience member accused Obama of “treason” and later told reporters, “I don’t correct all of the questions that get asked of me”; and of course, when Romney “joked” that “nobody’s ever asked to see my birth certificate” – well, moments like those reinforced the big lie and encouraged the right wing to continue to believe it…{In contrast]