Light dawns on marble head(s)?

Took the RNC long enough, but it looks like they finally got around to denouncing the Tennessee Republican party's ridiculous insistence on using Obama's middle name all the time. Now, I wish we lived in a world where saying someone's given name didn't inherently damage their reputation. Hussein is one of the most common names in the Arab world, one which, unfortunately for Obama, also happened to be shared by a certain dictator. But any rational person should be able to realize that there is no connection between Senator Obama's middle name and Saddam, right?

...right?

Tell that to Senator McCain and his illegitimate black child from way back in 2000. One idea from psychology is the so-called "Spinozan system" of belief formulation, whereby we see something and immediately make an assessment of its validity without seeking any further evidence - only later might we try to validate or disprove our initial judgment with, oh, I don't know, facts. So when a source we'd like to trust, such as someone in the government (or at least someone associated with it), puts forth a piece of "information," there is a decent chance that at least some people out there will use this irrational-yet-effective Spinozan system and blindly accept a patently ludicrous proposition. The more credible the source appears to be, the more likely this blind acceptance becomes.

So we have something of a perfect storm: ignorant Americans who only know "Hussein" as referring to Saddam, not to the thousands of other people with that name; the Spinozan belief-formation system, and its unthinking acceptance of absurdities; and the credibility that information gains by being distributed by the government. It was a pretty ingenious piece of propaganda on the part of the Tennessee Republican Party. But really, guys, couldn't we be putting that ingenuity to better use?