Yeah, you're a dumbass alright.

Unless you're a Libertarian ;)

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From the Washington Post:

NEWS TALK
The stupid people who will pick our next prez
Sorry, John and Barack: We’re not nearly as smart as you keep telling us we are.

By Rick Shenkman
Washington Post
Plenty of things are hurting American democracy — from negative campaigning to special interests — but one factor lies at the root of all the others, and nobody dares to discuss it. American voters, who are hiring the people who’ ll run a superpower democracy, are grossly ignorant. Here are a few particularly bogus claims about their supposed savvy.
1. Our voters are pretty smart.
You hear this one from politicians all the time, even John McCain, who promises straight talk, and Barack Obama, who claims that he’s not a politician (by which he means that he’ll tell people what they need to hear, not what they want to hear). But by every measure social scientists have devised, voters are spectacularly uninformed. They don’t follow politics, and they don’t know how their government works.
According to an August 2006 Zogby poll, only two in five Americans know that we have three branches of government and can name them. A 2006 National Geographic poll showed that six in 10 young people (ages 18 to 24) could not find Iraq on the map. The political scientists Michael Delli Carpini and Scott Keeter, surveying a variety of polls measuring knowledge of history, report that fewer than half of all Americans know who Karl Marx was or which war the Battle of Bunker Hill was fought in. Worse, they found that just 49 percent of Americans know that the only country ever to use a nuclear weapon in a war is their own.
2. Bill O’Reilly’s viewers are dumber than Jon Stewart’s.
Liberals wish. Democrats like to think that voters who sympathize with their views are smarter than those who vote Republican. But a 2007 Pew survey found that the knowledge level of viewers of the right-wing, blustery The O’Reilly Factor and the left-wing, snarky The Daily Show is comparable, with about 54 percent of the shows’ politicized viewers scoring in the "high knowledge" category.
So what about conservative talkradio titan Rush Limbaugh’s audience? Surely the ditto-heads are dumb, right? Actually, according to a survey by the Annenberg Public Policy Center, Rush’s listeners are better educated and "more knowledgeable about politics and social issues" than the average voter.
3. If you just give Americans the facts, they’ll be able to draw the right conclusions.
Unfortunately, no. Many social scientists have long tried to downplay the ignorance of voters, arguing that the mental "short cuts" voters use to make up for their lack of information work pretty well. But the evidence from the past few years proves that a majority can easily be bamboozled.
Just before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, after months of unsubtle hinting from Bush administration officials, 60 percent of Americans had come to believe that Iraq was behind the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, despite the absence of evidence for the claim, according to a series of surveys taken by the PIPA/ Knowledge Networks poll.
A year later, after the bipartisan, independent 9/11 Commission reported that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with al-Qaida’s assaults on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, 50 percent of Americans still insisted that he did. In other words, the public was bluntly given the data by a group of officials generally believed to be credible — and it still didn’t absorb the most basic facts about the most important event of their time.
4. Voters today are smarter than they used to be.
Actually, by most measures, voters today possess the same level of political knowledge as their parents and grandparents, and in some categories, they score lower. In the 1950s, only 10 percent of voters were incapable of citing any ways in which the two major parties differed, according to Thomas Patterson of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, who leads the Pew-backed Vanishing Voter Project. By the 1970s, that number had jumped to nearly 30 percent.
Here’s what makes these numbers deplorable — and, in fact, almost incomprehensible: Education levels are far higher today than they were half a century ago, when social scientists first began surveying voter knowledge about politics. (In 1940, six in 10 Americans hadn’t made it past the eighth grade.) The moral of this story: Schooling alone doesn’t translate into better educated voters.
— Rick Shenkman is an associate professor of history at George Mason University and the author of Just How Stupid Are We?

See, I told ya you were a dumbass.

-Jim