What Democrats say Republicans believe as undeniable "How to talk To Republicans"

The list of demonstrable malarkey that Republicans hold to be unalienable truths is laughably long: Obama is Kenyan; Obamacare has death panels, increases the deficit, and pays for health care for illegal immigrants; Abortions give you breast cancer and cause pain in fetuses as young as 20 weeks;

Iraq had WMDs and Saddam Hussein collaborated with Al Qaeda; Tax cuts increase government revenue; Obama's stimulus created no jobs, and in fact government spending is hurting our economic recovery; If we don't raise the debt ceiling, we can simply prioritize payments and avoid disaster; We are a Christian nation whose forefathers "warned the British" about our gun rights, "worked tirelessly" to abolish slavery, debated Creationism before Charles Darwin even thought of evolution, and never intended to separate church and state; Evolution is not real, and global warming, if it's even happening, isn't our fault. To a syllable, all of this is thunderingly wrong, contradicted entirely by peer-reviewed scientific studies, as well as the vast majority of economists, historians, doctors and logic itself. But try convincing a Republican. From the think tank to the phone bank, from the church pew to the floor of Congress, the Republican Party has adopted as gospel a litany of lies that stops just short of declaring the Earth to be flat. I worry that's next.

PS I don't drop this card often, but I have three degrees including a graduate level degree in Engineering with a focus on quantum mechanics and one NOT in science. And my IQ can't be measured on a standard test. So I am not some ignorant redneck. You, however, are a true example of ignorant stupidity.

Your trouble is that, for all your diligence and your intelligence, you aren’t a member of the clique. Your knowledge counts for nothing in the centralized propaganda discussion, because that is controlled by the "idiot left dolt” and his friends who have the printing presses and the broadcast studios.
Which all trace back to the development of the telegraph and the concomitant growth of America’s brain cancer, the Associated Press. The AP (and any competitive wire services, my analysis does not depend on the fact that the AP was aggressively monopolistic and was found to be in violation of the the Sherman Antitrust Act back in 1945) has the inevitable effect of homogenizing journalism down a common denominator. If you want to be a reporter, you want people to read what you write. The AP makes it possible for people across the country to read what that reporter writes provided it fits the template of the least common denominator of journalism.
And the “least common denominator” in question is the need of all journalists to attract attention so they can sell advertising. So journalism declares itself (note the singular, which is appropriate because all major journalism is joined at the hip via the AP “wire”) to be objective, so as to maximize the credulity of the unthinking. If you think for a moment, of course, you realize that subjectivity, the opposite of objectivity, lies precisely in failing to recognize the extent to which your own upbringing, culture, education, and experience and interest enable you to perceive certain things and prevent you from readily apprehending other, possibly more important, things.
Objectivity is not the natural default position for anyone, and the only way you can even attempt to be objective is to be upfront about any and all known reasons why you might not be objective. Thus, declaring yourself to be objective (or being a member of an organization that declares its members to be objective) is the precise opposite of actually trying to be objective.
There being, as I take it, no such thing as “unwise objectivity,” I cannot undertake to parse the difference between “objectivity” as journalists claim it, and “wisdom,” as the ancient Greek Sophists claimed it. We take from the Sophists the term sophistry, as a term of opprobrium. Journalists and their “objectivity” deserve no better.

I wouldn’t even think of blaming it on marijuana, for several reasons. Mostly because a lot of conservatives smoke a lot of marijuana as well.

An old comic in Playboy magazine put it well. It showed two police officers walking a beat. The caption was of one of them talking to the other:

“I smoked marijuana once. It made me want to beat the hell out of some criminal hippie scum.”

Interestingly, the Israeli army now uses it as regular therapy for soldiers diagnosed with PTSD, as it appears to be efficacious for that problem.

Some studies suggest that more liberal or radical leftist a person, the higher the likelihood of smoking dope. Don't conflate the people who support legalization with the people who smoke dope. And it's true that many conservatives may have been heavy users when younger or at least tried it. But I would bet that most people who are recreational users are more likely to be liberal or leftist in their politics.

I know my anecdotal info, like all anecdotal info, is less than scientific. But I would argue that people who like to get their brains scrambled through drugs are more likely to be libs. It may be a chicken or the egg thing, but I'll stick with smoking a lot of dope risks scrambling your thought processes. And not positively.

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