One more Study Confirms; "Republicans have bad brains."

Conservatives think differently than liberals. Why? How can we explain the differences? Should we even try?

Researchers are still trying, and that's not a bad thing. It can be a bad thing if you're a conservative hiding from the ugly truth.

I think the response to any one of these studies is always funny stuff. The lunatic right wing rantings of conservative elitist Jonah Goldberg, who's talent for writing gives legitimacy to intellectualized stupidity, offers a critique of a recent study he happens to find repugnant. Truth hurts?

The irony? Jonah Goldberg proves the very article he trashes below. It’s a thing of beauty.

Republicans have bad brains? "They do that because they were born that way."
If you say that about homosexuals, you are tolerant and realistic. If you say it about blacks, you are racist. If you say it about men, you just might be a writer for Esquire. But if you say it about conservatives, you're a scientist.

Over the past decade, a new fad has taken hold among academics and liberal journalists: call it the new science of conservative phrenology. No, it doesn't actually involve using calipers ... The measuring devices are better — MRIs and gene sequencers — but the conclusions are worse. The gist is this: Conservatives and liberals don't just have different world views or ideas, they have different brains; the right and left are just hard-wired to think differently.

Author Chris Mooney compiles much of this research for his new book The Republican Brain, which purports to show that conservatives are, literally by nature, more closed-minded and resistant to change and facts. His evidence includes the fact that conservatives are less likely to buy into global warming, allegedly proving they are not only "anti-science" but innately anti-fact, as well. "Politicized wrongness today," he writes "is clustered among Republicans, conservatives and especially Tea Partiers."

So when research paints an ugly picture, attack the messenger:

That's an entirely understandable view for Mooney to hold. He's a soaked-to-the-bone liberal partisan. But he crosses the line into pseudoscientific hogwash by trying to explain every political disagreement as a symptom of bad brains. For instance, Mooney claims Republicans have trouble processing reality because Republicans think "ObamaCare" will raise the deficit. No really, stop laughing.

The Affordable Care Act is paid for and has already saved money, the opposite of the recent Republican lies attacking the newest CBO report. Goldberg continues....

Of course, Mooney believes he's simply going where the science leads. Consider that one of the more famous studies was conducted by liberal researchers at UCLA ... subjects were asked to spot the letters M or W on a screen for a fraction of a second ... self-described liberals did somewhat better on ... according to the researchers, it means: "Liberals are more responsive to informational complexity, ambiguity and novelty." Liberals are also "more likely than are conservatives to respond to cues signaling the need to change habitual responses," NYU says. Translation: Conservatives literally aren't smart enough to be spell-checkers because they won't be able to understand quickly enough that the occasional W is just an upside down M. The data might be correct, but as with Mooney, the conclusions are beyond absurd. 

Veering away from research to opinion, Goldberg blathers...

Conservatives resist growth of the state, but that's not the same thing as resisting change....

Blah, blah, blah...so Goldberg goes back to his preposterous theory Stalin and Castro were liberals:

A famous study asserts that communist revolutionaries Joseph Stalin and Fidel Castro were political conservatives...

Goldberg sums it up by trashing science and genetics as something ominous:

Mooney doesn't seem to realize where he's heading with this nonsense. Never mind that this approach is inherently undemocratic and opens the door to "genetic" explanations for everybody's political views — blacks, women, gays, etc. — it is also self-serving bigotry that allows liberals to justify their own closed-mindedness on the grounds that Republicans aren't even worth listening to. After all, they're just born that way.

That door has already been opened with the rise of the tea party dunderheads.