Hallelujah! By the strictest standards of science, my most cherished belief has been proved to be fact. Nope, it has nothing to do with the existence of God, unequivocal evidence of evolution or the final word in the debate whether WWF Pro Wrestling and Reality TV are scripted.
Here it is: Science has proven that politicians and their hard-line supporters are sniveling, self-serving, weasels.
A recent study at the clinical psychology department of Emory University has uncovered something shocking. Well, maybe it’s not really shocking. Deep in our hearts, we knew it all along.
Through experimentation Emory scientists, directed by Drew Western, have discovered in "staunch party members" a "total lack of reason in political decision-making.” Bingo. Thought so! That explains it all!
It seems that what these brave soldiers of science did was to assemble a group of hard-line Republican and Democratic party supporters, hook them up to some bells and whistles all the better to study what parts of their brains functioned when “thinking.” The subjects were given conflicting statements by both President George W. Bush and Senator John Kerry while their brain… uh… “activity” was monitored. The test subjects became quite excited and defended their respective party leaders with gusto. And then, to make things even more fun, the subjects were given statements that proved their respective party leaders’ statements were false. By so doing, the researchers deliberately induced what is known as “cognitive dissonance.”
To put it simply, cognitive dissonance is what the brain goes through when what it truly believes is proven to be wrong. A confused brain has to go searching for some sort of pacifying explanation, no matter how bogus...
At this point in the experiment, the Emory University scientists had a quorum of cognitively dissonant partisan Bush and Kerry supporters all foaming at the mouth and wired up to monitors. (No, the research was not held during one of the two parties’ four-yearly presidential candidate nominations.)
Guess what? The section of the brain that controls reasoning, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, did nothing! That’s right, whatever gibberish their boy had spouted, the “staunch party supporters” would defend it without the benefit of rational thought.
The lights were on but nobody was home!
There's more. But this is enough for you to get the picture--the Bushies and the Dem's have all turned their brains off. Anyone surprised?
