All Your Fears About Texas May Well Be Verified

The Houston Chronicle has juicy details:

A University of Texas poll to be released today shows Republican presidential candidate John McCain and GOP Sen. John Cornyn leading by comfortable margins in Texas, as expected. But the statewide survey of 550 registered voters has one very surprising finding: 23 percent of Texans are convinced that Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama is a Muslim.

Obama is a Christian who was embroiled in a controversy earlier this year about his two-decade membership in Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ. Yet just 45 percent of those polled identified the Illinois senator as a Protestant.

The Obama-is-a-Muslim confusion is caused by fallacious Internet rumors and radio talk-show gossip. McCain went so far at one of his town hall meetings to grab a microphone from a woman who claimed that Obama was an Arab.

The Texas numbers are unusual because most national polls show that just 5 to 10 percent of Americans still believe Obama is a Muslim — less than half the number of Texans who buy into the debunked theories.

Conclusion of "Some Defunct Economist": Disinformation works on Texans at twice the rate it works on the rest of the population. This is probably due to the fact that in ordinary conversation people in Texas spend an inordinate amount of time reminding themselves who they are ("I'm a proud Texan..."), where they are ("here in the Lone Star State of Texas..."), and how to do things ("...well, we do things the Texas Way..."). You've heard it: "Well, since we're in Texas, we'll do things the Texas way, because this is Texas, and as a proud Texan, I have to do things that way."

That amounts to conversational crowding out: all the Texas-talk crowds out time to discuss things like facts, truth, or reality in general.