Over at Protein Wisdom, commenter “Andrew the Noisy” notes, referring to the Time magazine story on Glenn Beck:

It’s not bias. It’s like they can’t see their own anger. It’s like all Moveon stuff was done by someone else.

Well, no, of course they don’t. It’s absolutely fundamental to their worldview that they not notice.

As I have noted before, for an insult to sting it has to be applicable — its target has to feel as if it describes some quality or characteristic that actually exists, or that might be mistakenly concluded actually exists. And most people aren’t introspective — the vast majority of people simply go with what they’ve got or have already concluded, rather than examining their own precepts in an outside light.

A Progressive’s entire worldview is built upon the foundation of Doing Good, interpreted in a physical or worldly sense — feeding the sick, housing the hungry, curing the homeless. They never even consider the difference between doing good to and doing good for, so Thoreau’s comment (“If I knew … that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life.”) is simply incomprehensible. Unintended consequences are not a consideration; they are shrugged off when encountered. You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs, after all.

That’s why the ACORN business is reducing them to gibbering, non sequitur, and lashing out at random targets. They support(ed) the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now because its charter is to Do Good, and any peccadilloes it may have engaged in are trivial and below notice — diversion of funds? Phooey! Just give ’em more, so enough gets through to the Needy. But there is no way to characterize the enslavement of teenagers, especially brown teenagers, to force them to work as prostitutes as “Doing Good”, nor is there any way to dismiss it as simple peculation. If it happened outside the United States, they could shrug it off as a cultural peculiarity; but it’s right here, right now, and that sets up an intolerable tension between the self-image of Doing Good and the obvious reality of Doing Evil.

The tension is intolerable because, as noted, like most people they aren’t introspective. They aren’t capable of bringing reality into contact with preconception in order to resolve the tension because they aren’t capable of either contradicting their own assumptions or internalizing what is laughably known as “the real world”. The only resolution of the matter, for them, would be for the issue to go away, either by dropping below notice or by introducing something else to take attention away from it. Unfortunately for them, this time the real world is bombarding them without letup, and the shrieks and howls are music to their opponents’ ears.

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