Last week stories appeared across the media citing the facts that not only do 18% of Americans now believe that Barrack Obama is a Muslim, but that the number of such believers has been rising. Now… I’ll be the first to admit that I haven’t been pleased with some of what he’s done – or failed to do – but the fact that his middle name is of Islamic origin doesn’t make him a Muslim. Then there are the millions that believe Obama is not a U.S. citizen – except that he was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, on August 4, 1961, of an American mother. Since Hawaii became a state on August 21, 1959, he was born in a U.S. state, and, again, like it or not, that makes him a U.S. citizen.

Several other areas of “mis-knowledge” that have existed for so long that, while I still shake my head, I now know are a form of “folk stupidity” are the beliefs that “foreign aid” is a huge percentage of the federal budget or that all our deficit problems can be addressed by merely getting rid of the waste in the federal budget. Or, for that matter, that reducing taxes will solve problems – or, on the other hand, that taxing the rich will immediately balance the federal budget. Even a cursory look at the federal budget and outlays will show the falsity of these beliefs – beliefs that have existed for more than a generation and continue to persist.

Even supposedly intelligent members of Congress support stupid ideas – such as a fence along the U.S.-Mexico border. Two years ago, the non-partisan Congressional Research Service completed a cost study – and among other findings, the study showed that (1) a fence along the 700 miles most heavily crossed by illegal immigrants would cost $49 billion to build and maintain for 25 years, and (2) recently built security fences stopped immigrants in those areas, but did not change the total number of illegal border crossings because illegal immigrants simply crossed where there weren’t fences. Since the entire U.S.-Mexico border stretches some 1,952 miles, fencing the entire border would cost close to $150 billion – and wouldn’t stop the flow of illegals, not when the U.S. has over 12,000 miles of ocean coastline borders and almost 4,000 miles of borders with Canada.

History also offers an example. The ancient Chinese built a massive wall on their northern borders – several times. It cost tens of thousands of lives and who knows how much over scores of years – and it didn’t work, either, and that was in a time when rulers didn’t have to worry much about laws and civil rights…or immediately executing violators.

Politicians who opposed the health-care law on the grounds that the U.S. has the “best health care in the world” are pandering to another kind of stupidity – the idea that everyone else is “like us.” Not everyone is – and that’s illustrated by the 44 million Americans without health care… and people do die because of that lack – like the forty-year-old brother of a neighbor who was turned away at the acute care center because he lacked insurance after being laid off, and who died that night of asphyxiation from a strep infection that caused severe swelling in his throat and tonsils.

Then again, most of what I’ve called stupidity isn’t really that at all – it’s a rationalization of what those people holding those beliefs want to believe. Because Obama points out that Americans who are Muslims have the right to built an Islamic cultural center two blocks from the 9/11 World Trade Center ground zero, a right reinforced by a law sponsored by that arch-conservative Orin Hatch, many of those who feel strongly, either about Obama or Islamic believers, insist to themselves that Obama must be a Muslim because they can’t conceive of any other reason for his statement. Most Americans don’t want to believe that the vast majority of federal spending is actually spent on people here in the USA and with comparatively little outright waste [spending on dubious projects is not “waste,” just foolish]. And even the president is either pandering to that stupidity, or exercising it himself, when he claims that every American family that makes more than $250,000 is rich. They may be well-off, but they’re certainly not rich, not when it’s difficult, if not impossible, to raise a family in what most Americans, if pressed, would consider middle-class surroundings and schools in the most expensive U.S. cities for less than $100,000. Yes… $250,000 is “rich”… in Plano, Texas, or Richfield, Utah, or Nampa, Idaho… but most people today live in bigger cities with higher costs of living because that’s where the jobs are. Yet all too many Americans still think that a dollar is a dollar in value anywhere in the good old USA. It’s not… and it hasn’t been for generations.

Stupidity…or self-serving rationalization? Does it matter when the results lead to self-deception, hatred, pandering politicians, and poor public policies?