Stephen Ducat: The Red Bottoms of Red-Staters: How Corporal Punishment Contributes to Right Wing Paranoia »

As the recent lobbyist-choreographed, anti-health care, town hall lynch mobs have demonstrated, Republican leaders and right wing media demagogues will say anything to advance their interests and those of their moneyed sponsors. And, apparently, their constituents among the electorate will believe anything. No paranoid fantasy seems too bizarre, too implausible, or too disconnected from consensual reality to find a credulous audience among right wing true believers.

It is not especially hard to figure out why GOP politicians and pundits would make up whatever fictions might enhance their economic and political well being. But it is not so self-evident why middle and under class conservative voters would so eagerly, and at the moment, deliriously, swallow the delusional confections offered up by their cynical and amoral leaders. A provocative but largely ignored recent article in the New York Times might provide a clue.

Nearly all of the states in which it is legal for school authorities to inflict corporal punishment on children are in the South. According to a study jointly authored by Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union, not only is it acceptable to hit students in these Republican strongholds but disabled children receive a disproportionate amount of the beatings

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