An article from the New York Times today about Utah Republicans who still — still! — back Bush all the way. Read it — it’s head shakin’ good.

“When I watch him, I see a man with his heart in the right place,” said Delia Randall, a 22-year-old mother from Provo, the hub of a county that gave Senator John Kerry just 11 percent of the presidential vote in 2004. “I like George Bush because he is God fearing, and that’s how a lot of people in this area feel.”

…

“He’s strong, and he doesn’t waver,” said Jaren Olsen, 18, a freshman at Brigham Young, the nation’s largest religiously affiliated private university, who is from Albany. “I like that he is for the family, that marriage should only be between a man and woman. And the war, we need to finish what we started.”

Another student at Brigham Young, Danielle Pulsipher, a junior, offered blanket approval of the president. Asked to name which of his actions as president she liked most, she was hard-pressed to answer.

“I’m not sure of anything he’s done, but I like that he’s religious — that’s really important,” Ms. Pulsipher said.

I used to live among these people, and the ’92 election season was pure hell. I felt like I was in some kind of asylum. Boy, was everyone cranky at BYU the day after Clinton won.

At the heart of the Mormon experience is the gaining of a ‘testimony’: a spiritual conviction that the principles of the Church are true. And how do you gain a testimony? By feelings and experiences. In other words, for a Latter-day Saint, if you pray about something and you feel ‘good about it’, that means it’s true. That’s supposed to serve as verification! It’s garbage in, garbage out. You’re just bound to arrive at stupid conclusions if you buy stupid premises.

And that’s why Bush is so popular among Utah Mormons. He hits all the right buttons. They feel ‘good’ about him. Facts don’t matter; feelings do. Come to think of it, this is probably the process by which Bush decided to invade Iraq. No wonder they love him. They truly think alike.