Well, I guess it's now official: Republicans are in better mental health than Democrats, or even independents.
Why? Simple - They say so.
The fine folks at Gallup, a name synonymous with accurate non-partisan polling (who can forget 1948's "Dewey Defeats Truman") had a poll about mental health issues, and in doing some data mining ran into an interesting trend.
When you ask someone to rate their mental health, seems more likely that they will say it is "excellent" if they are republicans than either independents or Democrats, and this holds true if you even account for other factors like age, income, education, and even gender.
What this means, if anything, is up for debate, but what I thought most amusing was in the analysis at the end...
Correlation is no proof of causation, of course. The reason the relationship exists between being a Republican and more positive mental health is unknown, and one cannot say whether something about being a Republican causes a person to be more mentally healthy, or whether something about being mentally healthy causes a person to choose to become a Republican...
Emphasis mine.
Notice anything missing? Like, say, pointing out that this was SELF REPORTED mental health? And this poll is really not so much a poll about mental health than a poll about people's PERCEPTIONS of their mental health? And analyzing it as anything beyond that is, at best, intellectual wanking?
Sure, you might say, that's TECHNICALLY true, but why would anyone doubt that someone who considers themselves a Republican wouldn't be completely honest and forthcoming with a complete stranger on the phone about a personal matter that has no small amount of social stigma attached to it? That's just crazy talk!
If we have learned nothing from Larry "Happy Feet" Craig or Ted "I've been cured!" Haggard or Gary "Two wetsuits are better than one" Aldridge it is that Republicans are well adjusted, honest folks who are in no way invested in maintaining the illusion of complete normalcy to a judgmental and unforgiving society that they helped bring about and still maintain.
Nope, just goes to show, dummycrats really are barking moonbats, and now there are numbers to back that up...