Friday, November 30, 2007

Republicans feeling alright

By Libby

Gallup is touting a new poll showing that Republicans are self-reporting better mental health than Democrats or Independents. Under the heading, unintentionally hilarious, Gallup ponders this deeper meaning of the statitics.
Correlation is no proof of causation, of course. The reason the relationship exists between being a Republican and more positive mental health is unknown, and one cannot say whether something about being a Republican causes a person to be more mentally healthy, or whether something about being mentally healthy causes a person to choose to become a Republican (or whether some third variable is responsible for causing both to be parallel).
Perhaps they might want to consider the significant variable is self-reported and I'm betting the numbers reflect mostly the 30percenters who still think Bush is a great president. Of course those Republicans think their mental health is fine. They've somehow managed to learn to live with a level of cognitive dissonance that would make most people's head explode. The rest of us aren't feeling so good ourselves because we see what the Bush adminstration is doing and don't find it acceptable on any level.

That's the trouble with living in reality. It tends to dampen the old peace of mind when you see everything that was once great about this country being incrementally destroyed.

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