Charles Krauthammer sums it up nicely:

It's not just pages and pages of special-interest tax breaks, giveaways and protections, one of which would set off a ruinous Smoot-Hawley trade war. It's not just the waste, such as the $88.6 million for new construction for Milwaukee Public Schools, which, reports the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, have shrinking enrollment, 15 vacant schools and, quite logically, no plans for new construction.

It's the essential fraud of rushing through a bill in which the normal rules (committee hearings, finding revenue to pay for the programs) are suspended on the grounds that a national emergency requires an immediate job-creating stimulus - and then throwing into it hundreds of billions that have nothing to do with stimulus, that Congress' own budget office says won't be spent until 2011 and beyond, and that are little more than the back-scratching, special-interest, lobby-driven parochialism that Obama came to Washington to abolish. He said.

Right.  He continues:

After Obama's miraculous 2008 presidential campaign, it was clear that at some point the magical mystery tour would have to end. The nation would rub its eyes and begin to emerge from its reverie.

The hallucinatory Obama would give way to the mere mortal. The great ethical transformations promised would be seen as a fairy tale that all presidents tell -- and that this president told better than anyone.

I thought the awakening would take six months. It took two and a half weeks.

I don't blame you if you voted for Obama.  He's young, smart, charming and progressive.  John McCain is old and Republican and uninspiring.

Let's face it.  Obama's message was like a shot of smack to a nation full of people junked out on the drug of mass media messages.  We, as a nation, don't want to deal with our nation's problems.  Obama promised that, if elected, we wouldn't have to.  We got high on that message.

And now we gotta come down from the high.  Because like any drug, it's a false reality.  The real one is still out there waiting for us.

Look, don't get me wrong.  I don't know that McCain would have been any better.  The ruling class in Washington - Republicans and Democrats alike - are all dead-set on one task: aggregating as much power as possible in the hands of the Federal government.

And they're using the financial crisis as an excuse for immediate action.  We had choices.  There are other ways we could have stimulated the economy.  There were other alternatives.

None were heard.  There just wasn't time.

So, from all the possible alternative solutions, we just happened to get the one alternative that most grows the size and scope of the Federal government.

Somehow, this country must wake up.  We're entering a doomsday scenario:

• a bankrupt government
• using borrowed money
• to bail out bankrupt companies
• who lent borrowed money
• to bankrupt borrowers.

It's positively Escherian.