A common theme in tragic literature is the eleventh-hour realization that everything a zealous character has been doing only served to ensure his own imminent destruction. Like the upscale couple ordering the new imported-granite counter for the kitchen remodel as they miss their last overdue mortgage payment. Administration officials keep talking about a new stimulus, new entitlements, and more borrowing, even as staggering levels of newly accumulated debt are terrifying Americans and those abroad — and while most recovering economies in the world, from Canada to Germany, are getting their financial houses in order. As the administration keeps up the rhetoric against corporations, more and more businesses are hoarding their cash, not hiring, and postponing spending, out of fear of new taxes or entitlements, or some new “initiative” from a boot-on-the-neck, kick-ass administration. We are still worrying about helping homeowners get out of debt, even as Freddie and Fannie are facing yet another economic reordering. The idea that even well-employed couples can skip out on their underwater mortgages used to be considered wrong; now it has been redefined as something Washington understands. The bloodbath over health care and the post facto revelations about its probable costs and intrusive tentacles have lead not to introspection but to more zeal for even more unpopular sweeping notions, such as amnesty and cap-and-trade. Instead of sending promised troops to the border, we get promises to sue Arizona. The dismal response to the BP spill was used to fuel an even more unpopular cap-and-trade. I guess all this will go full blast until after November, when some Democrat may sheepishly remind his White House that stimulus is still borrowing and borrowing has limits; employers are just people who, like the rest of us, react to signals; borders separate nations; and our problem is not too much oil and gas but too little. Until then, we have a raging Pentheus still hunting out enemies as he goes headlong to an inevitable reckoning.