How does a Small Mind think? Not very well.

The following is from the book Mistakes Were Made (but not by me) by Elliot Aronson and Carol Tavris:

In 2003, after it became clear that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the Americans [who supported it] were thrown into dissonance: We believed the president, and we (and he) were wrong. How to resolve this?  

For Democrats who had thought Saddam Hussein had WMDs, the resolution was ... the president lied, or at least was too eager to listen to faulty information... 

For Republicans, however, the dissonance was sharper. More than half of them resolved it by refusing to accept the evidence, telling a Knowledge Networks poll that they believed the weapons had been found.  

The survey's director said: "For some Americans, their desire to support the war may be leading them to screen out information that WMDs have not been found. Given the intensive news coverage and high levels of public attention to this topic, this ... suggests that some Americans may be avoiding having an experience of cognitive dissonance."

That's one way of putting it.