“IF AT FIRST YOU DON'T SUCCEED, TRY, TRY AGAIN”

My elders, when I was a young lad and impressionable, used to repeat that old adage to me when I wanted to give up on a certain project, it was “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again”. That was sound advice about not giving up when you try to do something, because failure sometimes is the stepping stone to future success, but the admonition by Albert Einstein might be even more appropriate in some cases, it goes like this; “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”.

Can’t this admonition by Einstein apply to the fiscal policies of the Obama Administration? After pushing through an $800 billion “Stimulus Plan” and stating that it would jump start the economy and that unemployment wouldn’t go beyond 8%, neither of which happened, you’d think that Einstein’s words would have resonated with Obama and the Democrats? But, it looks like they both have “tin ears” and they continue to float the idea that more “stimulus” is needed by using more non-existent taxpayer money to be thrown down a rat hole. The first “Stimulus” has been a total failure.

When you have an economy where everything that should be up is down, and everything that should be down is up, you’d think a “sane” person(s) would attempt to change course to find alternatives for the failed policies that were put into place. One problem, Obama, Biden, and the other “Keystone Kops” in the Administration, don’t think that their policies have failed. They are still calling this the “Summer of Recovery” when it should be called the “Summer of Discontent”.

Obama seems to want to please everybody and to be a “person of the world” (whatever that means). In the process, he winds up pleasing no one. Last year, he butted into the Cambridge Police matter with his friend Professor Gates before he knew all the facts. He should’ve kept out of that local matter because he made the situation worse because of the words he used. Not learning from that experience, he forced his opinions in the Arizona border dispute without ever reading the statute in question, and just recently, he chimed into the proposed mosque dispute about erecting a mosque/community center near “Ground Zero” in NYC. In all cases, he stirred up the passions against him and he received zero public relations benefits by going against the thinking of the American people. You’d think a man of his “brilliance” would’ve learned from his mistakes, but if you tend to be a “narcissist” and a person who is a “legend in his own mind”, you can’t or won’t see the forest for the trees.

To continue to promote failed policies in the face of negative results means that he is “marching to a different drummer” or he just doesn’t give a damn. It truly is insanity to do something over and over again and then to expect a different outcome. I guess that is the price we all have to pay for electing such an inexperienced Chicago-machine politician to the office of President.

So, when someone tells you that if at first you don’t succeed, you shouldn’t carry out that admonition to its ridiculous extremes, and that you should realize that it is futile to make fallacious policies work no matter how hard you try, otherwise you fall into the “insanity” category as Einstein envisioned.

Conservative commentary by Chuck Lehmann