In this morning’s Jolt, there’s a lot about WikiLeaks and the ups and downs — mostly downs — of soft power, i.e., “weakness with a publicist” — but there’s also a bit about politics:

Yeah, Brian, You Guys Are a Bunch of Real Heroes
As I may have mentioned, almost every Thursday night I appear on Cam & Company heard on SiriusXM’s Patriot Channel and over the Internet at NRANews.com. Cam and I grab dinner before the show and often rant about the world of politics; one of the concepts we’ve discussed is certain politicians’ willingness to “rule a Kingdom of Crap” – and as you can probably guess, we’ve used more off-color terms. The idea is, certain power-hungry narcissists don’t really care whether their policies work, as long as they expand their power. They take the old saying about preferring to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven literally. They’re comfortable ruling a declining nation as long as they’re the ones doing the ruling, and they’re not willing to give up power for the sake of a better, stronger, freer, healthier nation.
A retiring Democrat, Brian Baird, insists his party’s philosophy is the precise opposite, that the Democrats love America so much that they embrace wise, politically difficult policies that end up costing them their seats: “Addressing the economic collapse of 2008 and the subsequent passage of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), Baird told The Hill, “Had we wanted to, we could have let the president, President Bush… stew in his own juices.” Baird insisted Democrats did the right thing passing TARP, which was signed by President Bush in the fall of 2008. Most Democrats in Congress backed it while it faced more resistance from the GOP. “We could have said, ‘The economy is going to collapse. The world is going to go into a depression. You’re going to get the blame and your party is going to get the blame because you’re in power and we are going to ride this into the majority for the next 40 years.’ That is what the Democrats could have done.’”
Presume for the sake of argument he’s right. But where was that darn-the-consequences, let’s-do-what’s-hard-but-necessary approach to the deficit? To entitlement reform for Social Security or Medicare or Medicaid? Why did Obamacare turn into everything Democrats wanted (down to the Cornhusker Kickback!), nothing they didn’t (tort reform) and why was it hammered through along partisan lines? And how much is he willing to defend every decision associated with the ever-morphing TARP proposal? Was the provision guaranteeing bonuses at AIG really necessary? How about GM and GMAC?
And Don Surber wonders, “9.8% unemployment is saving the economy?”