Maureen Dowd: "Monkey On A Tiger"

Vacation apparently agreed with MoDo; read it all here:

Washington: There was a touch of parody to the giddy Democrat takeover this week: Nancy Pelosi indulging her inner Haight-Ashbury and dipping the Capitol in tie-dye, sashaying around with the Grateful Dead, Wyclef Jean, Carole King, Richard Gere, feminists and a swarm of well-connected urchins.

The first act of House Democrats who promised to govern with bipartisan comity was imperiously banishing Republicans from participating in the initial round of lawmaking. Even if Republicans were brutes during their reign, Democrats should have shown more class, letting the whiny minority party offer some stupid amendments that would lose.

Perhaps the Democrats’ power-shift into overdrive is a neurological disorder, or neuropolitical disorder.If free will is an illusion — if we are, as one philosopher put it, “nothing more than sophisticated meat machines,” doomed to repeat the same mistakes over and over — that would explain a lot about the latest trend in which everyone is reverting to type.William James wrote in 1890 that the whole “sting and excitement” of life comes from “our sense that in it things are really being decided from one moment to another, and that it is not the dull rattling off of a chain that was forged innumerable ages ago.”

But in Science Times this week, Dennis Overbye advised Dr. James to “get over it,” observing that “a bevy of experiments in recent years suggest that the conscious mind is like a monkey riding a tiger of subconscious decisions and actions in progress, frantically making up stories about being in control.”

As Mark Hallett of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke told Mr. Overbye, “Free will does exist, but it’s a perception, not a power or a driving force. … The more you scrutinize it, the more you realize you don’t have it.”

That would explain why, after voters insisted that the president wrap it up in Iraq, he made a big show of pretending to listen, then decided to do a war do-over.

Is this just the baked-in stubbornness of one man, or is W.’s behavior evidence that he has no free will? Is the Decider freely choosing another huge blunder or is he taking instructions from his genetic and political coding, fearing that if he admits what a foul hash he’s made of Iraq, he’ll be labeled a wimp, as his dad was?