So everyone (on the right, at least) keeps noting that Obama’s “stimulus” package is nothing like an actual stimulus package and won’t help the economy. It’s just the an enormous spending and social-engineering package, the agglomeration of Democrat wish-lists of the past decade or so. It ignores the actual financial/credit crisis. Moreover, the bailout bills are propping up companies that should fail and have their assets stripped and put to productive work. In combination, they can be reasonably expected to retard, if not actively tank, the natural recovery of the economy.

And we know that Rahm Emanuel famously doesn’t want a crisis to go to waste.

So…is it possible that the Administration is deliberately attempting to retard economic recovery in order to ratchet up the economic pain in order to get more of their agenda through over the next couple years? If they don’t see a serious GOP threat in 2010, what’s the downside (other than the risk of actually wrecking the economy so comprehensively that it’s even worse by 2012)? It’s not like this crew is short on self-confidence. Could they think, “Hey, let’s use this, we’ll fix it later when it’s convenient?”

Your Volgi doesn’t like to be cynical, but this thought has been troubling him.

Confucius says, perhaps tangentially: The Chinese word for “crisis,” wei¹chi¹* (危機) is not, in fact, composed of the characters for “danger” and “opportunity.” Wei (危) does mean “dangerous,” but chi (機) is a polysemous element. It appears in “opportunity” (chi¹hui⁴, 機會), but it appears in a lot of other unrelated words. Like “airplane.” Alone it means “desk,” “machine,” or “moment.” So the Chinese understanding of “crisis” may derive from the idea of a “dangerous moment.”

Which seems increasingly apposite.

* Wade-Giles is the official Chinese transliteration system of the Gormogons.

Confucius, Œc. Vol.

Don’t ask impertinent questions like that jackass Adept Lu.