The End of Compassionate Conservatism

The House Republicans have done the almost impossible:  Made George W Bush look good compared to themselves…

Most Progressives, like me, always thought the concept of Compassionate Conservatives was Public Relations BS.  And it was…

But we obviously had not anticipated this heartless bunch of new GOP House members…

And of course the Democrats don’t now how to fight this- either in Congress or with a coherent message strategy.

The good news is I think the GOP over reach will eventually be their undoing.  At least for a while…

We will just have to hope they don’t kill too many people in the meantime….

From the New Republic:

House Republicans want to cut funding for health programs abroad and for community clinics here at home. And although the projected savings are small, at least relative to the size of the federal budget, the philosophical shift they signal is big. This is the end of compassionate conservatism.

You remember compassionate conservatism, don’t you? It was George W. Bush’s slogan, going back to the late 1990s, when, as a candidate, he told audiences that “Prosperity without purpose is just materialism” and vowed to “rally the armies of compassion in our communities to fight a very different war against poverty.”

Cynics saw it as empty rhetoric or, worse, a deliberate distraction from policies that were actually quite harsh to the nation’s least fortunate. The cynics had a pretty good point. Bush raided the treasury, in order to give wealthy people huge tax cuts, and the resulting budget crunch has forced all sorts of cuts to vital programs over the years.

Still, Bush never gave up the rhetoric of compassion. And on at least a few occasions he lived up to it. Community clinics were one example: As president, he doubled their funding. According to an account by Kevin Sack in the New York Times, that led to the creation or expansion of more than 1,200 clinics around the country. “This is a really good use of the taxpayers’ money,” Bush said at the time, noting that good primary care helps keep people out of the emergency room

AND

Today, by contrast, Republican leaders are perfectly content to walk away from these programs and many others without so much as acknowledging the consequences, let alone addressing them. Poor people in the U.S. might not be able to get basic medical care? Victims of HIV abroad might lose their life-sustaining drugs? If Republicans have paused even a moment to think about these things, they sure haven’t shown it.

via House Republicans Turn Out The Lights On President Bush’s Compassionate Conservatism | The New Republic.