(With your indulgence, this is a re-post from Sergey’s Page entry)

“It hurt. People who had said they were voting for me were now coming up to me and saying ‘You know, I hear you could be lying to us.’ I was shocked. I got the courage to approach some of them, people I had talked to and who said they were voting for me. Here they were wearing J.J. Ament stickers. I was like, you know, wow, and they said ‘But how do I know you’re not going to assert some form of sharia law against Colorado?’”

Back at election time, we had some fun ridiculing Oklahoma’s anti-Sharia law. Some were wondering just how such a bizarre idea could make it onto the ballot.
Truth is, these things don’t just pop up out of nowhere. They can spread to every hamlet in the country and take on the aura of hard fact almost without the reality-based community noticing. Besides the internet, talk radio, and the various tea party organizations, they do this through a loose-knit but pervasive network of fundamentalist groups. These networks are also the glue holding together the campaigns to teach creationist superstition in public schools, to condemn gays and so on.
As someone noted a couple of years ago, it is almost an underground counterculture. It does nothing to conceal itself, quite the opposite, but it is somehow not taken seriously by major media and other mainstream cultural interests. This really has to change, or we will end up wondering how President Palin or Huckabee managed to get into office.