What is there about so many people today that they have lost - if they ever had it in the first place - the capacity for critical thinking?

The guy before you offered up not an opinion supported by facts and analysis and rational argument but rather a drive by smearing, simply claiming that "Sinatra was an asshole". It seems that such drive by smearings are, these days, given equal weight - at least by those who cannot think and reason critically - with facts and reasoned argument. I simply do not encourage this kind of ignorance and stupidity. My bad.

At least you attempted to provide an argument for your agreement with the drive by smear artist. Your argument was that "There are a lot of people who downright hate Sinatra, my parents included, so it's not hard to believe the dude was an asshole." This is a spurious and illogical argument but at least you made an attempt.

I could counter your argument by correctly noting that there are millions of people around the world who downright love Sinatra, my late parents included, so its not hard to believe that Sinatra was not an asshole.

Trouble is these two arguments are both one of the logical fallacies in that they claim that truth is whatever a large number of people believe it to be. I remember my dad instructing me on this in 1958 when I bought an Elvis Presley album with the cover title reading "50 Million Fans Can't Be Wrong" which was the number of records sold from the singles in that album. Mind you, I thought it was a great album but I was able to understand why the title argument was a logical fallacy and why 50 million people may well be wrong.

In truth, I do not take this stuff too seriously but I do take ignorance and stupidity seriously and sometimes (but not usually) I comment about it as with the drive by smearing. Had this not been Frank's 100th birthday I would have not bothered. OK?