redundant acronym syndrome syndrome

Kottke faces his demons and admits he suffers from RAS Syndrome (redundant acronym syndrome syndrome). Of the three "linguistic explanations" given on the wiki page, I found #1 to be highly unlikely (it assumes a ridiculousnessly high level of meta-linguistic analysis on the part of the average speaker); #2 and #3 were roughly the same: Acronyms are treated as unanalyzed lexemes.