Burn After Reading - The Idiot Plot

"The Idiot Plot, of course, is any plot that would be resolved in five minutes if everyone in the story were not an idiot."
— Roger Ebert in his review of Narrow Margin (1990)

The 2008 black comedy "Burn After Reading" by the Coen Brothers is a film of fools doing foolish things to disastrous consequences. Each character for the most part overestimates their own standing and refuses to see the world as it is, but is that ideologically driven, do these people within the story have ideologies? For a film that is based in D.C. and told from the perspective of a C.I.A operative it's politics are remarkably scant, so then what drives each character to behave the way they do?