This morning as I was covering a good post at Small Craft Warning here, I was thinking specifically about these lines:

The President looks at problems not so much to be solved, but as opportunities to score political points and advance an agenda that recent polling has shown, even a majority of his voters don’t want. President Reagan had a sign on his desk that read, “It is amazing what a man can accomplish when he doesn’t care who gets the credit.” President Obama should have a sign on his desk saying, “It’s amazing what I can accomplish by blaming others for the problem.”

…when I wrote this:

In Obama’s career history, there is no evidence of problem resolution. Being a “community organizer” and a politician carry the same mindset where all battles are political and the problems are never ending. The objective of both is to win grants, influence or establish perpetual programs that never die and never solve the problems.

After all – if the problems were actually solved, there would be no need for either community organizers or politicians, right?

In their world, delivery of a sub-optimal “solution” is success because the goal is not to resolve the issue but to assure that they get to keep fighting it with public money. That is how they define “victory” and why political victory matters more than actual victory.

Then I got to thinking about something I wrote in The Paradox of the Wealthy “Progressive”:

Over the past several months we have witnessed perhaps the greatest paradox of “progressivism”. We have seen:

• Rich people calling for more taxes on themselves.
• Rich and successful left leaning famous people claiming “solidarity” with a “movement” [OWS] that is motivated by the belief that wealth should be confiscated and redistributed.
• Rich “progressives” preaching the eco-gospel, yet jetting around globally on private jets.

Since even a blind squirrel stumbles over a nut now and again, when I thought about those two posts and the confirmation bias, cognitive dissonance and political amnesia displayed by Diane Reeves and Joe Budd and Richard Weber of Panama City, Florida here, I had a Eureka! moment. I think I’ve finally figured out what is driving these folks.

It is these six things:

1. It is clear that they are ready to blame anyone but themselves – but I don’t think it is totally about blame, it is a level of embarrassment that they feel , combined with arrogance and complete disbelief that the application of their perfected ideology hasn’t solved the problems of society.
2. As a result, that frustration is exponentially expanded because in their minds, failure of their pet ideology means that none of the problems we face can be solved. They hold themselves in such high regard and elect people like Obama, who are purported to be the smartest people ever, so obviously, if the problems aren’t solved by these people and the perfect ideology, they are simply not solvable.
3. The element of blame enters into the equation when they see that the problems are not solved even though they have the perfect ideology and they know that they are the smartest people in the room – the only conclusion is that the are so smart that they could not possibly have created an unsolvable problem, therefore, someone else must have done it.
4. You might be thinking that if 1, 2 and 3 are so difficult for them to take, why do they continue to jockey for positions of power where they know that they will be facing unsolvable problems created by other people? Well, it is because they crave and enjoy attention, even if it is negative attention – sort of like when a child misbehaves in order to be noticed by neglectful parents- and the best way to do that is to keep everything in a controversial state.
5. Because they can’t solve problems created by other people through application of their perfected ideology by the smartest people, they have nothing left other than to create a false feeling of necessity by exercising power over others. Positions of power allow them to hide the fact that they can’t solve the problems but are too arrogant and prideful to admit it. Their view of themselves is through a glass darkly and that view means that they believe that they are still smarter than you and therefore are entitled to guide you through life because, after all, that’s just what smart people do for the less intelligent, right?.
6. I think that they have lost the will to solve anything; they wish only to prolong the problems. If they can’t solve them, the only way to continue to be perceived as smart and retain power is to preserve the conditions that allow them to remain in a position of authority. Any admission to the contrary would mean that they aren’t the smartest people in the room, that their ideology is not perfect and that perhaps they at least helped to create the problems.

This is purely my opinion drawn from observations and this also applies to most Washington politicians of either party; however, I do think these six characteristics are more prevalent in our “progressive” friends (both in political office and their supporters) than in the same groups on the conservative side.

But our problems do have solutions – we have not always had these issues. When you understand, as I noted in an earlier post, that Democrats have had control of both houses of government for around 80% of the last 60 years and the Presidency for half that time, it is time for an intervention. Conservatives, and I include myself in this group even though I have changed my party affiliation to “independent” and am a classic liberal, have to do two things – a) teach our children about our beliefs, and b) stop trying to convert “progressives” and directly confront them.