The Psychomyopic Democrats

Exactly as I see it, and always have. You will never have to ask "why?" again. Their motives are naked to the eyes of all who choose to see, which makes the Drive-by/Antique/MSM media so dangerous. The cloak of sincerity has been draped upon them for too long, and the veil of legitimacy. It is time they were lifted, once and for all...T
For several months, I have felt like the little boy in The Emperor’s New Clothes. Standing in the middle of a crowd of my elders and betters, watching the current political spectacle, I have been waiting for someone to say the obvious, waiting in vain until I feel compelled to blurt it out myself.

Here goes: “Many Democrats want the US to fail in Iraq!” I don’t mean that they think we’ll fail—they want us to. They want a big embarrassing collapse of US military and political policy in Iraq and will do whatever they can to make it happen. There, I’ve said it and I feel much better.

That doesn’t mean that they are traitors, taking bribes from al Qaeda, or prepared to jeopardize their country’s welfare to advance their careers. Not all of them, at least. There are some prominent Democrats who are morally so far gone that they may just possibly think that way. (After all, a person who can think up Travelgate is capable of any infamy.)
But the vast majority of Democrats think of themselves as loyal Americans and a polygraph would show that they honestly believe it.

The neural pathways inside their heads run something like this:

• The best thing for the United States would be for the Democratic party to come back into power.

• A really embarrassing failure in Iraq would tip next year’s election toward the Democrats.

• Therefore, a failure in Iraq would be good for the USA.

Take another issue, illegal immigrants. I contend that, if for no other reason than homeland security, it is essential that we seal our borders against illegal immigrants and expel the ones we have now. The reason behind the Democratic party’s insistent call for amnesty for all illegal immigrants has nothing to do with compassion; the syllogism is rather:

• The best thing for the United States would be for the Democratic party to come back into power.

• Illegal Hispanic immigrants, if naturalized, would vote overwhelmingly Democratic.

• Therefore, the naturalization of illegal immigrants would be good for the USA.

To explain this peculiar logic, we must look to the emerging field of mental ophthalmology, which describes the aberrations of what Hamlet called “the mind’s eye.”

Blurring the Mind’s Eye

One such aberration is psychomyopia, or mental nearsightedness. Like most politicians in most parties in most countries of the world, these Democrats cannot see beyond the next election. Issues such as the fate of our nation, the fate of the Iraqi people, and the success or failure of Islamic terrorism are vague blurry background features that they cannot discern.. The only thing their brains can focus on is the nearby goal of getting into power and staying there.

The Democrats are not alone in this aberration, of course. Psychomyopia is a widespread affliction. Republicans are sometimes just as bad when they are out of office or with regard to certain topics that will not be discussed here. It flourishes in all kinds of settings.

Bureaucrats and (if you’ll pardon the double misnomer) civil servants are often so preoccupied with career survival that they cannot see even the most urgent assigned tasks in any other light. Journalists can be so obsessed with publishing a scoop that they are oblivious to the harm they may cause by doing so. And let’s face it, dear reader, haven’t you and I occasionally been guilty of similar myopias?

But psychomyopia can be a relatively mild aberration, due to stupidity and shortsightedness. It is often not culpable because “they know not what they do.”

It is even occasionally curable, not by glasses but by patient explanation. A notable literary example of a cure is described by Robert Louis Stevenson in “Father Damien”:

…he had originally intended to lay out [the money] entirely for the benefit of Catholics, and even so not wisely; but after a long, plain talk, he admitted his error fully and revised the list… I was struck by the fact that he had the honesty of mind to be convinced. I may here tell you that it was a long business; that one of his colleagues sat with him late into the night, multiplying arguments and accusations; that the father listened as usual with “perfect good-nature and perfect obstinacy”; but at the last, when he was persuaded — “Yes,” said he, “I am very much obliged to you; you have done me a service; it would have been a theft.”

It is rare, but it does happen. And it attests to the shortsighted honesty of at least some psychomyopics.

The symptoms of psychomyopia are easily confused with those of psychoglaucoma, or tunnel vision—a preoccupation with one aspect of a situation, coupled with a willful refusal to consider certain other aspects. As in physical ophthalmology, the latter is much more serious and (along with psychoastereopsis – failure to perceive depth) one of the few aberrations of the mind’s eye that can twist a soul into something evil.

Psychoglaucoma is culpable because it perverts the essence of free will. As Aquinas and others have pointed out, we are not free to refrain from choosing an obvious good or rejecting an obvious evil. Our freedom consists in deciding to ignore certain aspects of the choice—to avert our eyes from factors we don’t wish to see and confine our attention to the rest.

An intelligent and just man forces himself to see all aspects of a problem and therefore chooses the good. A psychomyopic cannot see some aspects but chooses as best he can. But a victim of psychoglaucoma chooses evil by seeing only what he wants to see and avoiding what he doesn’t want to see
The Bible provides us an example of psychoglaucoma, the elders in the story of Susannah, who

…suppressed their consciences; they would not allow their eyes to look to heaven, and did not keep in mind just judgments. [emphasis mine].

I remember a confrontation between pro-abortion and anti-abortion demonstrators, on a street in East Los Angeles some thirty years ago. One of the pro-life demonstrators held up poster showing a large picture of a baby-like fetus. He was surrounded by pro-choice demonstrators who were trying to cover up his poster with theirs—they didn’t want to look at it! Later, at a rally, pro-life advocate Susan McMilllan was asked about initiating a dialogue with pro-choice leaders.

“It doesn’t do any good”, she replied, “they know what they are doing and refuse to discuss it.”

Like the corresponding optical aberration, psychoglaucoma is a slow progressive disease. You develop it by first ignoring a few tiny unpleasant details and then, over the course of several years, you pile one self-deception on top of another until, without conscious dishonesty, you can be utterly oblivious to whatever you don’t want to see.
The Psychomyopic Democrats