The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.

image1131Out on a Limb

  • “The Obamacare rollout is not the only mess the federal government is making.”–subheadline, Hoover Institution website, Oct. 29
  • “Snakes Trigger Alarm in Our Brains, Study Shows”–headline, South China Morning Post (Hong Kong), Oct. 29

This Story Is Half-Vast 
“An almost unfathomable gap divides public attitudes on basic issues involving gender, race,religion and politics in America, fueled by dramatic ideological and partisan divisions that offer the prospect of more of the bitter political battles that played out in Washington this month,” reports ABC News:

A new ABC News/Fusion poll, marking the launch of the Fusion television network, finds vast differences among groups in trust in government, immigration policy and beyond, including basic views on issues such as the role of religion and the value of diversity in politics, treatment of women in the workplace and the opportunities afforded to minorities in society more broadly.

While these issues divide a variety of Americans, this poll, produced for ABC and Fusion by Langer Research Associates, finds that the gaps in nearly all cases are largest among partisan and ideological groups–so enormous and so fundamental that they seem to constitute visions of two distinctly different Americas.

Maybe the guys at Fusion were born yesterday, as their network apparently was, but ABC has been around for decades. Do the people there really find it “unfathomable” that different ideological groups have different ideological views?

For more “Best of the Web” click here and look for the “Best of the Web Today” link in the middle column below “Today’s Columnists.