It’s time for the 2015 Crazy Quiz!
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Yes, folks, it’s that time of year again. Climb into the clown car and test your smarts. No fair Googling for the answers!
1. Back in March, which aspiring Republican presidential nominee was leading in the national polls? And who ranked second?
2. Identify the blatant lie that Donald Trump did not concoct out of thin air:
a.) 81 percent of white homicide victims are killed by blacks.
b.) The body of water that traverses his Sterling, Virginia, golf course was known during the Civil War as the “River of Blood” because “many great American soldiers died at this spot.”
c.) The Chinese are militarily involved in the Syrian war.
d.) 9/11 terrorists sent their girlfriends back to the Middle East so they could watch the attack on TV.
e.) Vaccines have triggered an epidemic of autism.
f.) “Thousands and thousands” of New Jersey Muslims celebrated 9/11 on their rooftops.
3. During a debate, Hillary Clinton invoked the horrors of 9/11 in order to defend:
a.) her support for a Syrian no-fly zone.
b.) her extensive use of a private email server.
c.) her husband’s ties to Clinton Foundation foreign donors.
d.) her extensive ties to Wall Street donors.
e.) her decision to put with Bill’s serial schlongings.
4. Who did Jeb Bush describe as “pretty hot?”
a.) Taylor Swift
b.) Supergirl
c.) Jessica Jones
d.) Emma Watson
e.) his wife
5. True or False: A top Ben Carson adviser said that, with respect to economic policy, the candidate didn’t have “one iota of intelligent information” in his head.
6. When Beau Biden died, right-wing trolls pawed their keyboards and posted (among other things):
a.) “one less liberal politician”
b.) “my liberty is under attack, no sympathy here”
c.) “he has such a complete a-hole for a father”
d.) “I was happy to hear he died”
e.) all of the above
f.) all except d
7. Back in the spring, a campaign aide saw her candidate schmoozing with voters and cynically said, “She’s so good at making people think she’s good at people.” Name the candidate.
a.) Nikki Haley
b.) Carly Fiorina
c.) Hillary Clinton
d.) Selina Meyer
e.) Elizabeth Warren
8. According to an autumn national poll, what percent of Republicans still believe, without a shred of factual evidence, that President Obama is a Muslim?
a.) 43 percent
b.) 33 percent
c.) 23 percent
d.) 13 percent
9. Name the public figure who boasted that he’d risked his life in a war zone, when in reality he was 1,000 miles away. And who, when queried about his lie by a reporter, responded by saying, “I am coming after you with everything I have. You can take it as a threat.”
10. In the ’15 debates, which candidate boasted that he once killed a man?
11. This was supposed to be the Year of the Super PAC. It clearly was not. Which candidate’s super-helpers spent a whopping $44 million on 15,000 ads this year — all in vain, because the candidate still polls in the anemic single digits?
12. Lindsey Graham says that man-made climate change is real. (“When 90 percent of the doctors tell you you’ve got a problem, do you listen to the one” who says otherwise?) But he has exited the Republican race. How many of the remaining 13 candidates firmly believe in climate science?
13. True or False: Hillary admitted earlier this year that she had lied when she said that she’d dodged sniper fire at an airport in Bosnia.
14. Trump said recently: “It’s disgusting. I don’t want to talk about it.” What was he referring to?
a.) Hillary’s facial wrinkles
b.) Hillary taking a break to go to the bathroom
c.) Hillary’s decision to eat a low-cal burrito at a Chipotle
d.) Hillary’s prediliction for pantsuits
e.) Hillary putting up with Bill’s extracurricular schlongings
15. Which has-been Republican candidate said this year, “I do not believe that the president loves America”?
a.) Rudy Giuliani
b.) Newt Gingrich
c.) Sarah Palin
d.) Rick Perry
e.) Tim Pawlenty
16. Here in locked-and-loaded America, which ’15 candidate cooked bacon on the barrel of an assault weapon? And which ’15 candidate was known for saying “We love us some guns”? And which ’15 candidate launched his congressional career with an NRA endorsement? And is it true or false that the number of Americans who were gun-murdered on Christmas Day (27) is roughly equal to the total number of people killed in gun homicides in an entire year in Austria, New Zealand, Norway, Slovenia, Estonia, Bermuda, Hong Kong and Iceland combined?
17. True or False: Harry Reid, who announced his retirement in ’15, is the main reason why we don’t have a national repository for our nuclear waste — and he basically cut a deal with Obama to keep it that way.
18. Carly Fiorina quickly earned a rep this year as a serial liar. But one of these Fiorina statements is actually factual! Which one?
a.) “Obamacare isn’t helping anyone.”
b.) In America, “16.1 percent of women live in poverty.”
c.) “92 percent of the jobs lost during Barack Obama’s first term belonged to women.”
d.) A video shows “a fully formed fetus on the table” at a Planned Parenthood facility, “its heart beating, its legs kicking.”
e.) She kick-started her career when her future husband plucked her “from the secretarial pool.”
f.) While she was CEO of Hewlett-Packard, an HP subsidiary did business with Iran, violating U.S sanctions — but a probe by the Securities and Exchange Commission “proved that neither I nor anyone else in management knew” about the violations.
19. True or False: Bill “Stop Me Before I’m Wrong Again” Kristol said this year that the GOP should award the prexy nomination to Donald Rumsfeld — because “he has a much better record” than Hillary.
20. Ted Cruz, citing a recent academic study, said this year, “Here’s the simple and undeniable fact: The overwhelming majority of violent criminals are Democrats.” But there’s a problem with his “undeniable fact.” Identify it.
a.) There’s nothing in the study — zilch, nada — about the voting habits of violent criminals.
b.) The study’s authors examined ex-felon voters in only three states; in a separate study of three other states, the authors found that most ex-felon voters didn’t register with either party.
c.) The study’s authors are donors to the Cruz campaign.
d.) In the study that Cruz cited, most ex-felons didn’t bother to register at all, much less vote.
e.) all of the above
f.) all except c
21. Which sagacious observer confidently predicted last January that Mitt Romney was “clearly mapping a third presidential bid”?
a.) Peggy Noonan
b.) Brian Williams
c.) Bill Kristol
d.) Joe Scarborough
e.) Dick Polman
Answers:
1. Scott Walker, Jeb Bush 2. c (Ben Carson made up that one) 3. d 4. b 5. False (the aide was referring to foreign policy) 6. e 7. d (Selina Meyer is played by Julia-Louis Dreyfus on Veep) 8. a 9. Bill O’Reilly 10. Jim Webb 11. Jeb! 12. One (George Pataki, who’s polling at zero pct in the climate-denial party) 13. False (she ‘fessed up in ’08) 14. b 15. a 16. Ted Cruz; Bobby Jindal; Bernie Sanders; True 17. True 18. b 19. False (Kristol’s actual choice was Dick Cheney) 20. f 21. e
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Dick Polman’s column appears weekly on WHYY.org/News. He also contributes to The Atlantic online and is a writer-in-residence at the University of Pennsylvania.
