I think Janeane Garofalo said it best before the 2004 election:

“At this point, I think voting for Bush is a character flaw.”
—Janeane Garofalo to The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart, May 5, 2004.

But many of us believed even beforre then that it was not merely a ‘character flaw’ but a sign of active psychosis.

A while ago I began to do some numbers on districts voting one way or another in recent elections…many of the districts I noticed having a high GOP percentage vote exhibited a combination of low education level (as measured by the percent holding college degrees) and high income (as measured by avg/median income). I never finished it since I don’t have access to the raw data, but I began to notice that neither factor alone was always sufficient to explain voting preferences in general, though in some sub-regions this was true.

This was enough to convince me that you can never just look at one factor, especially only in one region.

Nevertheless, the hypothesis this guy is testing is intriguing, and bears more looking into!

Considering that this was probably a simple correlational study—since neither psychosis nor voting behavior could be easily subjected to direct manipulation by the researcher—I think it’s safe to say that the study is most likely free from the potential for demand characteristics.  However, because this was a correlational study, the results should not be interpreted to suggest that being psychotic causes one to vote for Bush—statistical correlations NEVER indicate causal relationships, but only indicate co-existing strength of two factors which may or may not have a relationship to each other. It’s equally possible that voting for Bush is more likely to encourage psychosis, or that there’s a third variable which both makes people more prone to vote for Bush AND develop psychosis, or that the two factors are entirely unrelated and that any similarity between the two is due to coincidence. Lohse, frankly, should know better than to suggest that a correlational study automatically implies a direct relationship. This is one of the reasons why it’s so easy to mislead people with statistics—and why it’s important for people to view any and all statistics with skepticism if not outright cynicism.

Was there ever any doubt?

Well, thank you for answering my question about those who support Bush, “What is wrong with them?”  I have my answer. They are insane.  The rest of us are just as crazy for putting up with anything less than a full and complete accounting of EVERYTHING which has gone on in this administration followed by the guilty parties being held fully accountable for their actions. We owe this to every one of our troops who died in Iraq or were injuried.  We owe it to every Iraqi who we killed in this illegal war.  We owe it to the rest of the world.  We owe it to ourselves.  We owe it to our country to stay involved in our government and vow never again to turn it over to those who’s only qualifications are that they have enough money to steal the elections and buy the media.  Or did the media buy them???

Before he started bombing Iraq, and I heard
Bush say, “I want to be The-Commander-in-
Chief of the first War of the Twenty-First
Century.” I asked myself who in their right
mind want to be the Commander-in-Chief of
any War, because MANY, MANY innocent people
get killed. I believe anyone that still
believe anything Bush say,or does has a
serious thinking problem.

The patients of psychotic are still much more intelligent than King George.

I always love it when empirical evidence supports intuitive hunches. Trust yourself.

GEORGE W. SHOULD WRITE A BOOK ABOUT IRAQ.

HE COULD CALL IT

“A MILLION LITTLE PIECES”

believing that supply-side manifest destiny fairy tale IS the american mental illness that threatens the species.