Sharon Begley proves that I am stupid

In her recent column in Time, Sharon Begley opens a big ol' can of condescension whoop-ass on the opponents of government-run health care. You can almost hear Sharon saying "Oh, for Pete's sake! You other liberals can't make this 'death panel' thing go away by just claiming that the people who buy into it are stupid! Here. Let me do it. I can prove scientifically that they're idiots!"

The Mainstream Media, you see, has exhausted itself in "debunking" the myth of Sarah Palin's "death panels." They're all out of ideas. So Sharon takes it upon herself to show that people who won't let go of the notion that "health care reform" is a Trojan horse for full-blown socialized medicine must suffer psychologically from confirmatory bias and cognitive dissonance. And we caught these diseases from the Internets, apparently.

She goes on to prove that "people actually seek out information that confirms what they already believe" by spending half of her editorial space rehashing her own confirmatory bias in opposition to the Iraq War.

And here's this gem:

First of all, let's remember that 59,934,814 voters cast their ballot for John McCain, so we can assume that tens of millions of Americans believe the wrong guy is in the White House. To justify that belief, they need to find evidence that he's leading the country astray. What better evidence of that than to seize on the misinformation about Obama's health-care reform ideas and believe that he wants to insure illegal aliens, for example, and give the Feds electronic access to doctors' bank accounts?

Sharon apparently didn't get the memo -- the "that's not in the bill!" line of reasoning for calling reform opponents liars has gone by the wayside. Your faster-paced, Twitter-connected leftie isn't even trying that one anymore. No, this year's "reform" bill, whatever it turns out to be, is the leading edge of a government takeover of cradle-to-grave medical care -- economic costs, Constitution and any opposition be damned. To summarize: We can read, Sharon! The Lefties have confirmed all of our biases for us!

But that's beside the point. Sharon points out that nearly 60 million Americans voted for not-Obama. So, since Obama won, those people now must 1) "find evidence that he's leading the country astray" in order to justify their failure to vote for The One, or 2) acknowledge that their side lost the election and get with the program. Principled opposition to the downward slide to socialism isn't part of her diagnosis. Therefore, her hypothesis is that those choosing option #1 are "seizing on the misinformation" about wise President Obama's utterly benign "reform" plans. Thus is displayed an elegant academic proof that those opposed Obama are crazy or stupid.

Read the whole thing -- her lack of self-awareness is absolutely breathtaking, evidenced by her use of the Iraq War as an example. Sharon: The "Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11" line was a line of the Left, honey. It was a slogan of the anti-war Left, for whom "confirmatory bias" is a knee-jerk reflex -- "If America needs to fight somebody, America must be wrong and we want America to lose!" (Furthermore, if you want to talk about irrationally seeking to confirm one's own biases, let's mention Hillary Clinton still spreading the lies about the "stolen" 2000 election, or Andrew Sullivan's never-ending obsession with Sarah Palin's vagina, and go from there.)

The "conservatives are metal defectives" meme is one the progressives just cannot stay away from. Like clockwork, every couple of weeks it occurs to one of them -- and they write about it as thought they've just discovered it. Presumably there will be generous coverage for victims of "confirmation bias" under ObamaCare, and Sharon will not have to turn to the icky free market for help with her Liberal Superiority Complex.