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"Obama did exactly the opposite of what should have been done" for the economy.

Said "Black Swan" author Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

"He surrounded himself with people who exacerbated the problem. You have a person who has cancer and instead of removing the cancer, you give him tranquilizers. When you give tranquilizers to a cancer patient, they feel better but the cancer gets worse."

This medical metaphor makes me think of Obama's old red pill/blue pill scenario from the summer of 2009:

What I've proposed is that we have a panel of medical experts that are making determinations about what protocols are appropriate for what diseases. There's going to be some disagreement, but if there's broad agreement that, in this situation the blue pill works better than the red pill, and it turns out the blue pills are half as expensive as the red pill, then we want to make sure that doctors and patients have that information available to them.

Some people read that as "death panels" ? that is, that what the government would really do is give cheap, painkilling pills and wait for death to extinguish the expense altogether. So: "When you give tranquilizers to a cancer patient, they feel better but the cancer gets worse." That might be something some people would want to do.

There are inferences other than ineptitude.

Full post as published by Althouse on September 25, 2010 (boomark / email).