Google “dan ehl” and you’ll come up with my stories and columns, as well as a few postings on a blog called State 29, the tormented ravings of an obviously delusionary lunatic. He parrots all the extreme right wing hate mongering and then some. But I can only feel sorry for him because of recent studies that show his ilk should be pitied — and then heavily medicated.

One title on his blog is “Dan Ehl Loves Terrorists.” I come by this label because of a column against torture. If being against torture makes me a terrorist lover, I guess so are the framers of the Constitution and all of America’s greatest statesmen, artists, writers and most people’s moms.

“I think most Americans probably agree that it's perfectly fine that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was tortured,” he writes.

So much for cruel and unusual punishment and the Eighth Amendment.

He also wrote that I am a Jew hater because I criticized the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, which resulted in a huge loss of civilian life, one-third of who were children.

I guess this means if I ever criticize Italy, I hate Catholics — or if I bash Minnesota, I have it out for Lutherans.

It wouldn’t be hard to write off the blog’s author as just a dolt deficient in reasoning skills as have others.

“I've pulled State 29 from the links on your right, largely due to his inability to remain ‘insightfully vulgar,’ instead of just moving down to vulgar. This post was the nail in the coffin, but calling for Tom Harkin to die in a plane crash and his recent obsession with college-age porn didn't help,” writes the author of an interesting blog called the Diary of a Political Madman.

But, being the bleeding heart liberal that I am, I’m afraid I have to feel compassion for him since a federally-funded study says that people like him are, ah, not as well balanced as others.

Called “Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition,” known to others as the “Conservatives are Crazy Study,” it linked together Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Ronald Reagan and Rush Limbaugh.

"One is justified in referring to Hitler, Mussolini, Reagan, and Limbaugh as right-wing conservatives," the authors write in a published adjunct to the study, "not because they share an opposition to 'big government' or a mythical, romanticized view of Aryan purity — they did not share these specific attitudes — but because they all preached a return to an idealized past and favored or condoned inequality in some form."

Or as Steve Martin once said, “I believe that Ronald Reagan can make this country what it once was - an Arctic region covered with ice."

The authors also wrote that the study was an examination of "the hypotheses that political conservatism is significantly associated with (1) mental rigidity and closed-mindedness, including (a) increased dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity, (b) decreased cognitive complexity, (c) decreased openness to experience, (d) uncertainty avoidance, (e) personal needs for order and structure, and (f) need for cognitive closure; (2) lowered self-esteem; (3) fear, anger, and aggression; (4) pessimism, disgust, and contempt....We have argued that these motives are in fact related to one another psychologically, and our motivated social-cognitive perspective helps to integrate them."

Yikes. Now you see why I feel sorry for that pathetic and hopelessly demented freak.

One of many sources for the study was New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. They quoted him as writing, "It has been observed that Republicans are far more single-mindedly and unambiguously aggressive in pursuing Democratic scandals (e.g. Whitewater, the Clinton-Lewinsky affair) than Democrats have been in pursuing Republican scandals (e.g. Iran Contra, Bush-Harken Energy, Halliburton).”

He also wrote, “There is a level of anger and hatred on the right that has at best a faint echo in the anti-globalization left, and none at all in mainstream liberalism. Indeed, all the liberals I know generally seem unwilling to face up to the nastiness of contemporary politics."

And if that’s not enough, there is the study by Dr. Kelly Bulkeley that found conservatives have more nightmares. The study examined male and female college students who strongly identified themselves as either liberal or conservative and analyzed their dreams.

Among a number of sad findings of the study as listed by the Web page was “that people on the left were less often the initiator of aggressive interactions in their dreams, and their aggression was less physical in nature; people on the right were more often the aggressors in their dreams, and their aggression was more often physical.

“People on the left had a greater number of dreams involving friendliness and good fortune, and fewer dreams involving misfortune; people on the right had a greater number of dreams with misfortunes, and fewer dreams with friendliness and good fortune.

“Male rights had the lowest percentage of family members and instances of sexuality, and the highest percentage of animal characters and being the aggressor.

“Male lefts had the highest frequency of female characters, and the fewest instances of aggression.

“Female lefts had the lowest percentage of being the aggressor in their dreams, and the highest frequency of friendliness and good fortunes.

“Female rights had the highest frequency of sexual interactions and physical aggression.”

So there is just no way I can get really angry with someone saddled with “decreased cognitive complexity” or plagued by “dreams with misfortunes, and fewer dreams with friendliness and good fortune.” Poor little schizoid.