How Dumb Are Americans? (Pretty Dumb.)

By Alan Colmes, from Alan Colmes' Liberaland:

NEWSWEEK asked 1000 Americans to take the official citizenship test, and the results aren’t pretty. (h/t Political Wire)

…29 percent couldn’t name the vice president. Seventy-three percent couldn’t correctly say why we fought the Cold War. Forty-four percent were unable to define the Bill of Rights. And 6 percent couldn’t even circle Independence Day on a calendar.

We seem like a third world country compared to how other countries perform on these tests.

In March 2009, the European Journal of Communication asked citizens of Britain, Denmark, Finland, and the U.S. to answer questions on international affairs. The Europeans clobbered us. Sixty-eight percent of Danes, 75 percent of Brits, and 76 percent of Finns could, for example, identify the Taliban, but only 58 percent of Americans managed to do the same—even though we’ve led the charge in Afghanistan. It was only the latest in a series of polls that have shown us lagging behind our First World peers.