Interpreting the results of the recent election as a mandate is not only risky but logically impossible. From Ed Kilgore:
Frightened by joblessness, “the American people” rewarded the party that not only opposed the stimulus but also blocked the extension of unemployment benefits. Alarmed by a ballooning national debt, they rewarded the party that not only transformed budget surpluses into budget deficits but also proposes to inflate the debt by hundreds of billions with a permanent tax cut for the least needy two per cent. Frustrated by what they see as inaction, they rewarded the party that not only fought every effort to mitigate the crisis but also forced the watering down of whatever it couldn’t block.
In philosophy we call these contradictions. As assertions, contradictions are meaningless in that they express no coherent idea. But as signals of irrationality they could not be more clear.
