Progressives aren't mentally normal, and neither is the GOP political establishment in Washington. Normal babies learn that if something hurts, you stop doing it, but when progressives see their policies fail, they blame the people involved and demand that the same ideas be tried again, and again, and again -- in just the same way that the GOP reacts to one Obama double-cross after another by trying appeasement and appeals to reason or fairness on the next issue, and the next, and the next.

Review any Obama policy and you'll find first that it has been tried at other times or in other countries, and second that the damage it does to the American ideal and the American nation is unambigiously predictable from the historical record - so if rule one says "don't do stupid stuff", then what's wrong with people who keep doing these things? Are they stupid? Insane? Or are their policies intended to achieve the destruction of American freedoms and American democracy?

Consider, for example, some of their domestic achievements: they've crippled American health care; corrupted federal agencies, including the IRS, the EPA, and the DOJ into political service; stopped innovation in banking, manufacturing, power generation; and software through tax and regulatory policies whose effect is to help billionaire oligopolists push their smaller, more disruptive, competitors out of business; made Spanish the nation's second language; inflamed racial tensions; strained every police and social welfare agency to the breaking point; and just about doubled the national debt while raising nearly every tax affecting the middle classes and working poor -- with the result that national statistics agencies now straight-facedly report unemployment at the boom times rate of 5.5% while one third of the workforce is either unemployed or significantly underemployed, and a Craigslist ad for a full time toilet cleaner will generally draw 200 responses on the first day.

The picture doesn't get more positive if you look at foreign policy, where they've specialized in selling out America's friends and encouraging its enemies: while bludgeoning Republicans over race and women's rights issues at home, the Obama democrats have strengthened male ownership of women and children throughout the Muslim world; encouraged riot, civil strife, and the killing of dissidents from Egypt to Somalia; betrayed democracies in Israel, Pakistan, and Taiwan; financed the growth of Argentine hatred for England through loans for deep-sea drilling (!) around the Falklands; forced Japan to rearm; and had multiple police and security agencies look the other way while an unknown, but possibly significant, number of Islamic fanatics dig themselves into the American social fabric in preparation for all out attacks on Americans once their champions in the White House leave office.

I don't think the left's leadership, as a group, is particularly stupid -- and their policies appear insane only if you value people, democracy, equality under the law, and economic progress. If you despise ordinary people, however, and want, as I think the national socialists now in control of the Democratic Party do, to re-establish feudal government, the left's actions make perfect sense -- but the GOP's response in getting along by going along does not.

The voters understand rule one: if it doesn't work, stop doing it -- and voting in establishment Republicans isn't working. They've done the right thing in electing Republican majorities to the House, to the Senate, into governor's mansions, and into the majority in most statehouses -- but the minute most of these people take the oath to defend the Constitution all the moral clarity that got them elected gets absorbed into a cloud of maybes and ifs and laters whose net effect is to make Neville Chamberlain look pretty good in retrospect.

Rule one is all the explanation anyone needs for Donald Trump: he isn't actually a Republican at all, but he's caricaturing the leader people want to see: someone willing to say "you're fired!" to the Washington elites -- in both parties.

More subtly, the same frustration with GOP waffling is driving Ben Carson's poll numbers: look carefully and what you see is Jimmy Carter redux, but his public policy persona is what makes headlines and that's been trending much more Trump than Boehner.

If it doesn't work, stop doing it -- that's the change in the air: and if you don't believe me, talk to Trump supporters: they're no more clear on what he stands for than he is, but they're clear on his willingness to say "up the establishment" and mean it. That's what counts, that's what they want -- and the first credible candidate willing and able to make "you're fired!" the new way of life in Washington is going to take the nomination, and the presidency, in a walk.