Interviewing Robert Duvall about his new film “Crazy Heart” (2009), co-starring Jeff Bridges, in which a broke-down alcoholic country singer is salvaged by the love of a good woman, got Hugh Hewitt reflecting on addiction in a different context.

Thus I was thinking about addicts and their troubles when yesterday’s story about a new “jobs bill” hit the news. Senators Baucus and Grassley had appeared to announce a new era of bipartisanship and an $85 billion dollar spending bill to help create jobs.

The United States doesn’t have $85 billion. It would simply be added to the deficit, the enormous, gigantic and growing deficit.

The “deal” had collapsed by the end of the day as Republicans shuddered and Harry Reid beat a retreat, but the message to the country was clear: The Congress still doesn’t get it. It is still addicted to spending money it doesn’t have in pursuit of a political redemption they cannot earn after TARP and the stimulus that wasn’t, after the takeover of GM and the still underway attempt to takeover all of banking and of course the undead Obamacare monster.

Congress is still hitting the bottle, hard. Even though it is going to kill many of its members politically. Most of the Republicans are in recovery, but as Senator Grassley proved yesterday, each one of them is one shiny press availability away from falling back into the depths of the governing style that proved their undoing in 2006 and 2008.

I doubt we can find anything like the required number of good women needed to redeem all the incorrigibles making up the majority of the current Congress. We’ll have to settled for a major intervention come November.