How can we talk some sense to people, who can not see the facts:

[rumpel]

Some time a go I came across an intersting article by John Dean. While pundits tried to explain Bush's win on so-called "moral values", a, to me, asthonishing picture of that segment of our citizenry emerges.
He refers to a report called "The Seperate Realities of Bush And Kerry Supporters" published by the Program on International Policy Attitudes and the Center for Intentional and Security Studies at the University of Maryland.


"Understanding The 2004 Presidential Election"


it starts with:
A large number of Americans are very unhappy - indeed, many are extremely depressed - about the 2004 presidential election returns. Countless supporters of Senator John Kerry are literally scratching their heads, unable to fathom how seemingly rational people voted for President George W. Bush to serve a second term. Given our poor economy, and the disastrous Iraq war -- with its bogus justification and its thousands of American casualties - Kerry supporters find it hard to imagine, let alone understand, the case for casting a Bush vote.

snip

Several Christian radio shows included frequent, unabashed proselytizing for Bush votes. Ministers, and their guests, regularly said that a vote for George Bush was the vote that God wanted cast. One minister advised listeners that "God's watchman" would be observing us all "in the polling booths," and reporting what we did directly to God.

snip

Why Are Bush Supporters Resistant to Well-Established, Non-partisan Facts

The report shows that Bush supporters seem to simply ignore information they don't like - even if it is confirmed by the Bush Administration itself! They continue to believe in arguments even Bush and Cheney themselves have dropped - the WMD, and the Saddam/Al Qaeda connection, respectively. And this may be because they get their information from unreliable sources.

Steven Kull, the report's author, provides a rather benign explanation for why this is: "The roots of the Bush supporters' resistance to information," Steven opines, "very likely lie in the traumatic experience of 9/11 and equally in the near pitch-perfect leadership that President Bush showed in its immediate wake."

This bond between Bush and his supporters, Kull notes, interacts with some "idealized image of the President" that they hold. And the two, together, make "it difficult for his supporters to imagine that he could have made incorrect judgments before the war, that world public opinion could be critical of his policies, or that the President could hold foreign policy positions that are at odds with his supporters."

To study this report is to realize that Bush won reelection through blind faith and loyalty. Bush did not acquit himself well in the debates: Kerry won adherents each time he spoke. But it seems it did not matter: Bush supporters either weren't watching, or weren't really listening, when the debates occurred. This becomes more glaring because the University of Maryland study shows the Kerry supporters were living in the real world.


http://writ.news.findlaw.com/dean/20041105.html
It is interesting that according to his article simple facts such as that the non-existence of WMD's in Iraq (prior to the invasion) is not believed by Bush supporters.