failure has not altered Democratic thinking an iota...

I'm congenitally skeptical of the idea of planning. Tony Snow puts the problem in a nutshell...(Thanks to Rand)

....They believe human events unfold in a neat and predictable manner. Call it the Theory of Human Orderliness. The idea is that one can harness the insights of science and the methods of engineering to perfect societies. Theorists believe sound plans can impel people to behave in an ordered manner -- like asteroids tracing their paths through the void....

.....The only flaw in the Orderliness Hypothesis is that it doesn't work if people are present. The war on poverty looked great on paper. It failed miserably in real life. Air-cleansing regulatory schemes looked great in computer models, but failed abysmally in reality. Centralized health care boasted of chalkboard elegance, but is breaking the bank right here, right now. The myth of managed affluence collapsed with the Berlin Wall.

And yet, failure has not altered Democratic thinking an iota. John Kerry boasted dozens of times in his debates with George W. Bush that he had a plan -- for everything: dental care, tree planting, street paving, book binding, teen rutting, mass transit, air circulation, steel production ... you name it. He announced these schemes with a sense of triumph, as if having a plan were superior to having a clue.

In resisting President Bush's infinitely variable approach to the ever-shifting situation in Iraq, Democrats have reverted to form. The cries for benchmarks and deadlines merely embody their weird faith in plans. Howard Dean unwittingly captured the absurdity of it all when he announced this week the precise number of National Guard units required to subdue Al-Qaida.....

You know, we never did hear the details of Kerry's plans. Pretty selfish of him not to share his wisdom.

It's tempting to gloat over a Democrat "meltdown," but that's not quite the word for it. Too liquid and flexible. We need a metaphor of rigidity, a term that might be used to describe a granite statue being transported in an old wagon without springs over a bumpy road, banging and slamming up and down, and gradually turning into a rounded blob churned in a soup of chips and dust...