Ah, this must be the reason my brilliant sarcastic zingers don't seem to have teeth, and the victims simply smirk and walk away.

Well if you listen to some of the arguments being made by Conservatives it ALL begins to sound like Satire after a while. I mean they actually claim that Obama's financial plan is a path way to "Slavery", that they are being taxed somehow with out representation, and that Succession is actually an option to dealing with Obama.

I'm not impressed. She says the survey shows that conservatives are more likely to think Colbert has some genuine conservative views underneath the sarcasm. I don't think that's a crazy thing to believe in the first place, and I would expect conservatives to believe it more than liberals. Colbert often directs his sarcasm at religion, but the man is a believer himself. It's not crazy to suspect the same could be true, to some degree, to his political sarcasm.

In any case, she doesn't say how much more likely conservatives are to believe this. Maybe it's barely beyond statistical noise.

Not enough to warrant the use of the "Idiot Nation" title.

Let me be charitable to our conservative friends. I can understand if someone only saw parts of the show, and no more than a minute or two at a time that they might mistake Colbert's satire for a sincere position. It's hard to do convincing satire when the real positions of conservatives are so absurd. That said, those who don't recognize it as satire would have to be self-absorbed, and a little below average in intelligence.

Just a quick note. The name of the study is “The Irony of Satire: Political Ideology and the Motivation to See What You Want to See in the Colbert Report.” While I agree with pretty much everyone else here that Colbert is skewering the political right, we should all keep in mind that maybe that's only because that's what we want to see.

I have many reasons for believing my point of view to be correct, but one should always be on the lookout for potential biases.

Come on, the guy was fucking invited to the fucking correspondents dinner and fucking made fucking fun of fucking bushyboy in his fucking smug fucking face. He proceeded to rightfully insult everybody else there, and even got the mainstream media upset at him.

That said... I call a Poe.

I suspect the real reason is that it's become increasingly difficult to differentiate between Stephen's idiot persona and genuine conservative news anchors like Glenn Beck. Republicans, many of whom watch the latter pundits, probably find it much of a muchness.