jack.gifThe stimulus bill is making "conservatives" run around like screeching idiots for two reasons. It is of course their default mode. More importantly, though, if the bill works — even if it just kinda-sorta works — then what do they have left of their dogma? If it can be shown that the government can actually do stuff like "fix problems," then there’s no just point to conservatism. Which, you know, there isn’t, except insofar as it’s a massive jobs program for innumerable, innumerate right-wing hacks, clowns, charlatans, liars, frauds, true-believers, and imbeciles of the Jonah Goldberg class. All "conservatism" is, at root, is vapid sloganeering about how "government doesn’t work." It’s easy enough for them to "prove" this when they’re in charge, as they’ve so spectacularly demonstrated. But what if someone can come in after them and run the place competently?

Well, that’s an existential crisis, isn’t it? Or at least it is perceived as such. How else to explain lunacy on the scale of that perpetrated by, say, Pete Sessions?

"Insurgency, we understand perhaps a little bit more because of the Taliban," Sessions said during a meeting yesterday with Hotline editors. "And that is that they went about systematically understanding how to disrupt and change a person’s entire processes. And these Taliban — I’m not trying to say the Republican Party is the Taliban. No, that’s not what we’re saying. I’m saying an example of how you go about [sic] is to change a person from their messaging to their operations to their frontline message. And we need to understand that insurgency may be required when the other side, the House leadership, does not follow the same commands, which we entered the game with"….

"If they do not give us those options or opportunities then we will then become insurgency of a nature to where we do those things that are necessary to making sure the American public knows what we think the correct answer is," Sessions said during the 60-minute interview. "So we either work together, or we’re going to find a way to get our message out."

Now, whatever else this is, it’s incoherent, freakish, and strange. It’s the sort of gibberish produced by someone faced with the choice of either cheering on appalling economic catastrophe, or else bringing on his own utter ideological obsolescence.