Adam Serwer, guest blogging on The Plum Line:

Sam Stein points to a startling number in a recent Newsweek poll showing that 52 percent of Republicans think the statement “Barack Obama sympathizes with the goals of Islamic fundamentalists who want to impose Islamic law around the world,” is either “definitely” or “probably” true. It’s a mistake to impart too much meaning to a single poll result, but this is still a pretty strange result — and it may be a manifestation of what Julian Sanchez has termed “symbolic belief,” simply saying you believe something as a matter of hyperbolic political expression, not because you really believe it.

However, I think the poll reflects, in part, the success of sustained efforts by conservative writers to make this exact case. This the “respectable” version of the “Obama is a secret Muslim smear,” the argument that the president himself might not be Muslim, but that he sympathizes with “them.” Since the sorts of people making this argument believe that Muslims are objectionable as a group, that’s a problem.

The poll result is also another example of the remarkable ability of the conservative base to hold two entirely contradictory impressions of a person at the same time — on the one hand Obama is a social libertine who wants to teach sex ed to children, end discrimination against gays and lesbians in the armed forces and allow women unfettered access to abortion, and on the other he’s part of a global conspiracy to institute a repressive interpretation of Islamic law that would prohibit all of those things. [Emphasis added.]

And it’s another example of the remarkable ability of the conservative power structure to entice its base into believing any old damned stupid thing.

Where is the concerted, consistent effort to counter these lies? The Prez says it’s not up to him. He’s above all that. And nobody else thinks it’s important enough, either.