Be afraid, be very afraid

A Newsweek magazine poll of Americans about current events, history and cultural literacy has produced what the magazine calls "pretty disheartening results."

That's putting it mildly.

Forty-one percent of respondents think that Saddam Hussein's government in Iraq was "directly involved" in the terrorist attacks of 9/11, despite a complete lack of evidence that it was involved in any way -- and despite countless media reports on the matter. (By the way, it's already been established that regular viewers of Fox News Channel are more likely than the rest of us to believe such nonsense.)

Most Americans also don't know that most of the 9/11 hijackers were natives of Saudi Arabia or that Abraham Lincoln was the first Republican president;

There are more people who can correctly identify last season's winner on "American Idol" than can name the chief justice of the Supreme Court.

POSTCRIPT: Actually, some of the questions in the Newsweek poll were kind of dumb to begin with. The magazine could have done a much better job of measuring the cluelessness of the American people.