The Second Time Around...

Well, given that the "stimulus" bill hasn't led to much in the way of job creation - if anything, it has led to increased job destruction through the misallocation of capital - the Democrats on the Hill are now contemplating a second stimulus package, which they promise, at least conceptually, will lead to more jobs.

The question that arises, as you can see here, is "Why make the same mistake twice?"


The answer is simple: making the same mistake over and over and over again and again and again is a sign of serious cognitive difficulties. There is an old axiom in the psychological world: you're crazy when you do the same thing over and over again and expect the results to be different each time when nothing else has changed.

I think you can see where I am heading with this.

First and foremost, the Democratic Party is, as once was said to journalists, "stuck on stupid," unable to understand that their fantasies, their dreams of a just society, fail to survive reality, and that their attempts to change reality, so that their dreams can come true, are as doomed to failure. Not because they're not trying enough, not because of those evil Republicans, but simply because reality is a bitch.

This is the fundamental problem: the Democratic Party has become so enamored of its fantasies that it is actively ignoring reality and what really matters in the addled attempt to change reality. This isn't just doomed to failure, but more importantly is becoming increasingly clinical.

Clinical? Clinical in the sense that it is a pattern of behavior that is recognized to lead to situations where someone may need to be institutionalized in order to avoid effects that are severely detrimental to that person and others; clinical in the sense that it is a pattern of behavior that is self-reinforcing, but not in a nice way; clinical in the sense that it cannot lead to the desired result, that the person in question is stuck on stupid.

The Democratic Party is stuck on stupid. This isn't merely the second time around: they've been that way since The Great Society.