Republicans Have Beautiful Minds

According to a new Gallup Poll, Republicans have better mental health. Of course, this is self-reported mental health, not mental health as assessed by others, such as fellow citizens, family members and medical experts.

Barbara Bush, wife of one president and mother of another, fits the mental health profile of the survey. When asked on ABC's Good Morning America on March 18, 2003 about the government censorship of photos of flag-draped coffins of American service personnel she replied, "Why should we hear about body bags and deaths. Oh, I mean, it's not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?"

Mrs. Bush was also quoted when touring a Houston shelter filled with evacuees from Hurricane Katrina as saying that so many of the people temporarily housed en masse without privacy or personal possessions in the sports arena "...were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them."

Former Senator Rick Santorum, who voted to give himself a pay raise while in Congress and has a personal worth in the millions, once vetoed welfare reform for mothers with young children with the comment that a little bit of struggle is sometimes a good thing. He also has a beautiful mind that he is now using to full advantage addressing auditoriums during Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week. According to its promoters "the week of October 22-26, 2007, the nation will be rocked by the biggest conservative campus protest ever with Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week!" That seismic activity you felt just before Halloween wasn't tectonic plates shifting, it was Young Republicans now beyond all bearing up, up, up and into nowhere, suddenly, scaldingly, holdingly all nowhere gone and time absolutely still and they were all there, time having stopped and they felt the earth move out and away from under them.

Yes, it is true - Republicans are happier than the rest of us. They have a firm sense of right and wrong (they're right, you're wrong) without the worry of nuance or any need for reconsideration when faced with bothersome facts and they know that they may be sinners in the hands of an angry God, yet they are also completely firm in their belief that they are saved and will one day have residence in the gated community called Heaven.

As for the rest of us, all the non-Republicans? Frank Rich wrote recently in The New York Times, "We are a people in clinical depression. Americans know that the ideals that once set our nation apart from the world have been vandalized, and no matter which party they belong to, they do not see a restoration anytime soon." According to this Gallup Poll, Frank Rich was being optimistic because the Republicans, it seems, are not downhearted at all.

There once was a piece of doggerel that went "See the happy moron, he doesn't give a damn. I wish I were a moron; My God, perhaps I am!" It must be the Republican theme song.

Written for Assimilated Press by roving reporter pinko