Timothy Noah in Slate today displays a stunning lack of both tact and common sense by asking: Are Bush supporters literally insane? Maybe he's just trying to be provocative.

He doesn't mean all Bush supporters, by the way, just the "working class" or "middle class".

The working class's refusal to synchronize its politics with its economic interests is one of the enduring puzzles of the present age. Between 1989 and 1997, middle-income families (defined in this instance as the middle 20 percent) saw their share of the nation's wealth fall from 4.8 percent to 4.4 percent.

His source link goes to a Democratic site where it's not quite easy to find the actual source (how about this, if you're quoting a number, link to the direct source, ya damned idiot). Defining the middle class as the middle 20% is simply ridiculous on its face, so what's probably happened here is that the "middle class" has been defined as the spectrum most likely to render the statistics the authors wanted. But nevermind...let's just assume for the sake of argument that the entire bottom 90% of the economy has done worse under conservative leadership than liberal leadership.

Noah says this refusal to synchronoize its politics with its economic interests is one of the enduring puzzles of the present age. Uh huh.

He goes on to say he's never seen a satisfactory explanation for this, so he wonders aloud whether these supporters are simply stone-cold fuckin' crazy.

Let's consider another possibility, then: The working class, or at least a large segment of same, suffers from a psychological disorder.

Nice.

Gosh, Tim...could it simply be that a fall in average national wealth of 0.4% over an 8-year period isn't all that much? Or that even if it did significantly impact the real income of middle and lower class Bush supporters there might actually be issues they care about more than money?

Nah, they must be nuts.