I often wonder whether many of the responses are simply my people expressing their political frustrations as opposed to things that they actually believe. For example, if people say that they believe Obama is a Muslim, is it because they just dislike him so much that they will latch on to anything that comes up to show it? However, that doesn't explain why a third of Democrats blame "the Jews" for the financial crisis.

There’s the 32 percent of Democrats who blame “the Jews” for the financial crisis. There’s the 25 percent of African-Americans who believe the AIDS virus was created in a government lab. There’s support for state secession, which may have been higher among liberals in the Bush era than among Republicans in the age of Obama. And there’s the theory that the Bush White House knew about 9/11 in advance, which a third of Democrats endorsed as recently as 2007. . . .