Chicken or the egg?

On the front page of Fox News. Unsurprisingly, CNN is not leading with this either.

A roundup of Gallup health polls over the past four years finds that Republicans are far more likely than Democrats to report having excellent mental health.

The survey found that 58 percent of Republicans polled reported having excellent mental health. Only 38 percent of Democrats and 43 percent of Independents reported the same.

The question is, does this mean that insanity leads a person to liberalism, or does liberalism lead to mental illness?

From my personal experience, my mental health improved greatly when I started taking personal responsibility in my life - sure, bad things had happened to me, but that didn't mean it had to continue to affect me and my behavior. With that realization came a movement toward conservative thought, i.e. the government wasn't responsible for taking care of me and the government wasn't responsible for legislating my behavior. Those two principles go hand in hand more than I think most libs realize; if one expects the government to not tell them what to do, one must show that one is responsible enough to not be told what to do. I think most people learn this in their teenage years, I'll admit it took me a few years longer.

Nuance is everything

This is not a post about Fred Thompson, this is a post about CNN.

In a story on CNN today:

Still, most say that despite a few gaffes -- such as his statement during a Florida trip that he didn't "remember the details" of the 2005 Terri Schiavo right-to-die case -- Thompson is still a favorite to win over the values voters that dominate the primary.

'Right-to-whatever' carries the implied meaning that the whatever is being applied to whoever is exercising that right. In this case, it seems to imply that Terri Schiavo was exercising her right to die, rather than the actual facts of the case: her 'husband', who was shacked up and had produced two offspring with another woman, pulled the plug on Terri Schiavo despite the protests of people who obviously cared more about her well-being. Can anyone really argue that a man engaged in a long-standing adulterous affair has the best interests of his wife at heart? But CNN refers to this as a 'right-to-die' case, implying that Terri Schiavo herself expressed the wish that she wanted to die and exercised that 'right'. No documentation exists that Terri Schiavo said that she didn't want heroic measures to save her life implemented, and Michael Schiavo didn't bring up that she might not have wanted heroic measures taken until seven years later, after he had won lawsuits due to her condition totaling well over a million dollars. He waited until everyone had been bled dry.

This should be more accurately termed a 'right-to-kill-so-I-can-marry-my-concubine' case. Or if one wants to be more sensitive to a cheating husband, a 'right-to-kill' case. But in no way is Terri Schiavo's death a 'right-to-die' case.