When a Lefty asks whether I support George W. Bush I have recently started replying "Of course, the
Dalai Lama considers President Bush family."
I love this response because it creates cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is a mental model I have used since my early days in marketing research in the early 1960s. First discovered in marketing research by Jack Brehm in 1955, when he found that buyers often looked at ads and sales material about a product they had already bought for days or weeks after they bought the product. Brehm showed that buyers were still convincing themselves that they had made the right choice...sort of fending off the lingering doubts they had before they made the purchase.
A few years later, Leon Festinger
showed with experiments that for any concept in our mental array of
concepts any existing or any new concept that we encounter that puts
the two concepts in conflict, forces us to compare the two conflicting
concepts and adjust both of them appropriately.
So if someone you love and admire (like the Dalai Lama) becomes close friends (or 'family') of someone you hate (George W. Bush) you must adjust your attitude toward one or both of them.
So I asked a Lefty friend, Bruce, what he thought of the Dalai
Lama saying publicly, after having spent much time over several years
with President Bush, that he and Bush were like family? Bruce, who had
earlier expressed admiration for the Dalai Lama said "the Dalai Lama must be a fool."
Two more common ways to handle the problem in terms of cognitive dissonance would be for a Lefty to say "I didn't know that" and forget the matter right away, in spite of having read it several times. Or, to say "Bush is so deceitful and cunning he is taking advantage of the Dalai Lama."
Try it yourself. The Dalai Lama and President Bush actually do like and respect each other, they are close friends.