Bruni the Clueless? NYT Columnist Mocks 'Clueless' Americans and 'Mean' Justice Scalia, But Botches Poll Facts
In his Sunday New York Times column, former White House reporter Frank Bruni took a whack at "America the Clueless" and Republicans in particular, but made a couple of pretty clueless errors of his own.
According to another survey, taken last year, about 65 percent of us can’t name a single Supreme Court justice. Not the chief one, John Roberts. Not the mute one, Clarence Thomas. Not even the mean one, Antonin Scalia. Though when it comes to Scalia, perhaps the body politic suffers less from ignorance than from repressed memory.
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.....Months later a different poll asked voters about President Obama's religious affiliation, persistently mistaken by some Americans to be Muslim. The good news? The share of voters making the Muslim error had dropped, to 10 percent. The weird news? Eighteen percent said Obama was Jewish.
By karmic law, Bruni's column mocking the ignorance of Americans itself contained two factual errors. A correction followed:
An earlier version of this column misstated the findings of an Associated Press survey last October that asked voters about President Obama’s religious affiliation. The share of adults who erroneously identified Mr. Obama as Muslim did not drop to 10 percent -- it in fact increased to 18 percent, from 17 percent in 2010, when the question was previously asked. Zero percent -- not 18 percent-- said Mr. Obama was Jewish. (The erroneous figures resulted from a typographical error. The A.P. promptly corrected it, but by then the erroneous numbers had already been widely disseminated online.)
