He saw both sides to everything and found he could not move.
"Where's Johnny?," James McMurtry

The reason Democrats are awful at running things is that they think too much. This is a generalization, of course. Recently, the Democratic Party has been home to spectacular non-thinkers like Gary Condit and Jim Traficant. On the whole, though, Democrats tend to make decisions after thinking way too much. More accurately, they make decisions in the belief that there is a singular right or wrong answer to a large problem.

How ironic. Cultural conservatives have long castigated liberal types as having "situational ethics." That is, liberals don't hold to any hard-and-fast moral rules, that there are no absolute right and wrong actions. And I think this is a fair assessment, by the way. Things change. Actions do, too. That's just fine.

The trouble comes when there are a bevy of situations to consider before making a decision. Take Afghanistan. The Prez took months considering his plans for the war over there, and he seemed to be fuzzy on the details even as he announced his intentions. Many of the generals and other folks involved in the making of these plans have said that the Prez is thinking hard about what to do.

I like that, myself. We had eight years of a president who made his decisions based on the amount of gas exiting his colon at a given moment. That sort of "thinking" brought us financial and military ruin. So thinking is a good thing.

But thinking too much brings paralysis. The current health care legislation is a case in point. Democrats want to fix every single little problem, and so they've crafted bills that run 2,000 pages or longer. The simple fact is that one bill, no matter how long, can't fix our health care system. Also, what works this year might not work in ten years. In short, situations change.

The best way to make decisions is to address current situations first. If you've got time and energy, try to plan for future situations. But if you screw around long enough, future situations will become current situations before anything is accomplished.

Yes, Republican health care "plans" are about as realistic as the notion that global warming is being caused by penguin farts. But that doesn't matter. The Democrats are in charge. They can make their own laws without any help from the other side. This won't last forever (perhaps only one more year), so they might as well make hay while the sun shines.

It's good to think before you act. But there is a definite limit to the usefulness of thought. As some point, there's too much to think about. And, as any true practitioner of situational ethics will tell you, there is no one answer to any big problem.

Should teachers use whole language or phonics methods when teaching kids to read? Yes. Both work well with different types of kids. I learned to read well before Kindergarten, and I failed every single phonics assignment I ever attempted. No one worried, of course, because I already knew how to read. There are other kids who need phonics. It's really wonderful we have all these tools for teaching kids to read. If one doesn't work, try the other.

We can't fix Afghanistan with one plan, and we can't fix health care with one plan. We can't fix urban public schools with massive testing (or charter schools, or vouchers, or...). Anything worth doing in our society requires flexibility at the national and local levels. And it's really hard to legislate flexibility.

There are those who call the Prez overly cautious or even afraid. I don't think that's true. But I do believe that sometimes he does think too much. And while a reasoned policy is generally a good thing, an overly-reasoned policy is often one that is too little, too late.

Of course, we've been working on some form of national health insurance since the Wilson Administration, so I'd be willing to take even a small dollop of too little, too late, if it meant progress.

Or is that thinking too much?

Jon Worley has learned that downing a couple of Troegenators tends to reduce thinking to a tolerable level.