Republicans Are Like My Cat

I have a cat. Her name is Twiggy. As a joke I like to call her The Twiggers because she's so damn unassuming and is, quite literally, a pussy. Everything makes her flinch. She's always cautiously walking around my apartment, hesitatingly sticking her paws out to touch inanimate things she's touched hundreds of times, like a pillow, and then running off scared when the pillow just sits there.*

Were she a person she'd probably vote Republican. Or at least that's the theory of Douglas Oxley, a political scientist from the University of Nabraska, who argues that people vote Republican as a survival instinct.

[His] team discovered that social conservatives react more strongly to shocking images and sudden noises by sweating more and blinking harder, compared to liberals. Such innate threat responses point to a biological, and perhaps genetic, basis for our politics...

The same trend held for blinking in response to a loud, random noise. Conservatives blinked a little bit harder than liberals, an innate response to a threat, Hibbing says.

Interestingly, Sarah Palin doesn't blink.

*In her defense she used to be owned by a psychopath who killed animals.

Friday, September 19, 2008