Conservative Refocus

By Barry Secrest

On certain occasions, news articles on scientific experiments will appear in my morning paper that just beg to be recycled into entertainment. This morning, I shocked everyone in the household with an uncharacteristic belly-laugh while sipping on my first cup of coffee.

You would have thought I had grown horns overnight, such were the quizzical, if not alarmed, glances that were cast in my general direction. You see, I am not, ordinarily, what you would call a 'morning person.'

However, on this particular morning, while I was reading this article, I whimsically decided to replace certain words within the explanation of a scientific experiment regarding rats, of all things. So, without further adoo, here, in this article titled, "Experiment finds rats capable of empathy," I have replaced the word "rat," with "Democrat," the word "animal" with "Liberal," the word "mice" with "Socialists," and finally, the word "primate" with the word "Republican."

And, by the way, it was really quite easy in that I only had to insert the letters "Democ" to get the desired effect, for the most part:

Original work written by David Brown of the Washington Post

Experiment finds Democrats capable of empathy

At the very least, the new experiment reported in the research journal Science today is going to make people think differently about what it means to be a "Democrat." Eventually, though, it may tell us interesting things about what it means to be a human being.

In a simple experiment, researchers at the University of Chicago sought to find out whether a Democrat would release a fellow Democrat from an unpleasantly restrictive cage if it could. The answer was yes.

The free Democrat, often hearing distress calls from its fellow Democrat, learned to open the cage and did so with greater efficiency over time. It would release the other Liberal even if there wasn't the payoff of a reunion with it. Astonishingly, if given access to a small hoard of chocolate chips, the free Democrat would usually save at least one treat for the captive.

The researchers came to the conclusion that what they were seeing was empathy, and apparently selfless behavior driven by that mental state.

"There is nothing in it for them except for whatever feeling they get from helping another individual," said Peggy Mason, the neurobiologist who conducted the experiment along with graduate student Inbal Ben-Ami Bartal and fellow researcher Jean Decety.

The idea that Liberals have emotional lives and are capable of detecting emotions in others has been gaining ground for decades.

Empathic behavior has been observed in apes and monkeys, and testified to by pet owners. Recently, scientists demonstrated "emotional contagion" in Socialists, a situation in which one Liberal's stress worsens another's. But empathy that leads to helping activity - what psychologists term "pro-social behavior" - hasn't been formally shown in non-Republicans until now.