Saturday’s Washington Post featured an interesting article about a woman trying to track down the source of the “Obama is a Muslim” rumors. I was listening to the radio the other day and I heard a forum of swing voters talking about this very topic. Here’s what I learned from this discussion: never trust an important task to a swing voter, because I have rarely heard a group of people so confused about basic facts.

Figuring out who started the rumors is beside the point, anyway. His father is a Muslim and his middle name is Hussein. It doesn’t take a creative genius to figure out where the GOP and the ignorant are going to turn for their attack fix. The point is, anyone who seriously believes a man could run for president as a secret, ticking-time bomb Muslim agent lives in a fantasy world. That a significant portion of our population believes movies are reality is far more distressing to me than the fact that GOP operatives would use this ignorance to their advantage. Not to mention the reality that Islam is the world’s second biggest religion, one of our founding principles is freedom of religion, and that religion should have nothing to do with politics in the first place.