Krugman on the Teapublican Mindset: "If evidence seems to contradict faith, suppress the evidence"

Sadly, as Paul Krugman correctly points out, it's not just on climate science that the Teapublican'ts follow the mantra, "If evidence seems to contradict faith, suppress the evidence." It's on everything: Marco Rubio's inability to admit that science has, indeed, figured out how old our planet is (and no, the answer is NOT 6,000 years!); "unskewing" the polls because they didn't believe it was possible President Obama could win reelection; adhering to "the dogma that cutting taxes on the wealthy leads to higher economic growth," etc, etc.As always, I can't even imagine how 47%, or even 4.7% for that matter, of Americans could vote for a party that is so deeply hostile to rationality, to empirical reasoning, to science, to reality itself. I'm sure in part this is a failure of our education system, but what else is going on here? Are these people dumbed down from watching the idiot box (particularly channels like Faux "News") hours a day from an early age? I mean, that could certainly rot people's brains out of their heads. Are certain personality types simply immune to things like facts, logic, and math? All of the above? Any other theories?