
THE DUNCEPHANT -- Proud symbol of the compassionate conservative, big-tent, self-defeating, Stupid Party
Compassionate Conservatism
“I call my philosophy and approach compassionate conservatism. It is compassionate to actively help our fellow citizens in need. It is conservative to insist on responsibility and results. And with this hopeful approach, we will make a real difference in people’s lives.”
President George W. Bush
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/04/20020430.html
Let’s get this out of the way up front. The Republicans got their heads handed to them in the 2008 presidential election because they deserved to. And it had nothing to do with the selection of Sarah Palin as McCain’s vice presidential candidate. In fact, that was the lone, good decision anyone in the Republican brain trust has managed to make in years, notwithstanding the snide remarks and lies told by the scuttling rats inside the McCain organization and their sycophantic hangers-on in the pundit class.
No, the Republicans put a lot of effort into defeating themselves, and it started long before Sarah Palin killed her first moose. They walked away from the conservative ideals that got Ronald Reagan elected twice in landslides, and won them a congressional majority in 1994. Why? Because the Republican “leadership” never really believed in those ideals. You see, at its core, the Republican Party is a bunch of spineless whores.
Yes, I said whores, and I meant it — exactly in the sense P. J. O’Rourke used the term, in the best American political science textbook ever written, his PARLIAMENT OF WHORES – a Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire US Government.
The spineless Republican retreads who guide the party’s destiny will sell their allegiance to any interest that promises to get them reelected – and this is the sad part — whether or not a rational person would see the slightest chance that it would work.
Like a beaten, bleeding hooker who refuses to file an assault complaint against her abusive pimp, because he “really loves her,” even after he has beaten her to a pulp for the umpteenth time, this core of Republicans returns to courting “moderates” and “undecideds,” and “reaching across the aisle,” even after two runaway victories with Reagan, and after winning back a majority in the House and Senate in the abortive “Republican Revolution” of 1994.
They chose their most recent standard bearer, John McCain, because he is a faithful follower of this self-destructive tradition. He was perfect for the job.

But he was only the most recent keeper of the flame. Go back to 1992, to the modern roots of this pathetic legacy. George Herbert Walker Bush, who was elected in 1988 on Reagan’s conservative coattails, turned his back on his own, “no new taxes” promise. In the endless search for the Bigger Tent the Republican whores thought would win them a second term, GHWB bequeathed to us eight years of Clinton, Clinton, Gore & Co.
In an effort to keep the conservatives from drifting away, or worse, from fomenting an outright revolt, Republican campaign bosses told us throughout this dark period to give them our money and efforts, threatening us with the nightmare scenario of socialist utopias and Stalinist gulags if the Democrats got their way. Of course, those same brave, Republican soldiers were practicing “bipartisanship” the whole time, “reaching across the aisle” to the Democrat minority and Republican turncoats on anti-constitutional legislation and incompetent or evil judicial appointments.
Thanks to eight years of high-profile sleaze and transparent power-grabbing by the Clintons and their lawyer-thugs in expensive suits, the voters recoiled sufficiently at the prospect of Kerry and Gore to give us eight years of George W. Bush. Again, conservatives were told to give money, get out the vote, and — after each election — to sit down and shut up. Our reward was eight years of bloated spending and rampant federal bureaucratic expansion, under the brand name of “Compassionate Conservatism.”
Let me chase this cockroach of an idea out from under the refrigerator and stomp on it, once and for all.
George W. Bush’s “Compassionate Conservatism” is to “conservatism” what “armed robbery” is to “charity.” Compassionate Conservatism is neither compassionate, nor conservative. Like calling the unrestricted right to kill unborn children “pro-choice,” Compassionate Conservatism is a marketing fraud. Why should the American people have been alarmed by Republican warnings that, if elected, Obama was going to “redistribute the wealth?” The Bush administration did that for two terms. Obama just turned on the afterburner.
Bush signed McCain-Feingold (AKA: The Incumbent Hacks Protection Act), ramrodded through No Child Left Behind, and championed a colossal prescription drug welfare program. All the while, he actively promoting a storm surge of illegal immigration that overwhelmed the health care and criminal justice systems, swamped government schools, and turned entire American communities into suburbs of the Third World.
The compassion actually shown by Compassionate Conservatism was restricted largely to Democrat ideologues, illegal aliens, government bureaucracies, Saudi petrocrats, pharmaceutical companies and teachers’ unions.
Conservatives who voiced disapproval of unfettered illegal immigration were accused of lacking compassion; of being un-Christian; of wanting to deprive international trespassers of “jobs Americans won’t do.” And, in a breathtaking display of ignorance and/or arrogance, our president called American citizens who stood on our national borders as witnesses to the violation of our laws and sovereignty, “vigilantes.” To add insult to insult to injury, John McCain looked down his nose at “quote, conservatives,” as he referred to us often, and reminded us, as if from the moral high ground, that illegal aliens are “God’s children, too.” Thanks for the reminder, Reverend John.
The one issue on which all conservatives are supposed to agree about Bush is that he prevented another 9/11. Really? Am I supposed to be grateful that, between administration-mandated sensitivity classes for FBI agents on “Islam, the Religion of Peace,” those agents had time to uncover several plots to blow things up and kill people in the United States? It is certainly no thanks to the Bush administration’s slavish obeisance to political correctness that some such plots have been discovered and thwarted. Thank God for individual initiative and integrity, some plotters’ incompetence, and some good fortune.
However, like the aforementioned cockroach under the refrigerator, for every plot discovered, how many plots remain undiscovered? How many Islamist sleeper cells have slipped across our negligently unprotected borders, or been allowed to enter on “student” visas by our negligent immigration bureaucracy, carrying the components of weapons of mass destruction past negligent Homeland Security bureaucrats, while those sensitivity training sessions were going on? How many plots have not been discovered because the perpetrators have simply not been called to become active — yet?
Are we “safe” from Islamist aggression thanks to lectures from our State Department on not using terms like “Islamist aggression” — or in spite of them? If “Palestinians” are not lobbing missiles into Israeli schools and blowing themselves up in Israeli pizza parlors for a few days, is it because Condi Rice has lectured Israel on which of its appendages it should chop off next, and offer it to the bombers and missile crews as a gesture of good will? Or is it because the “Palestinians” have temporarily run out of missiles and suicide bombers?
Can we really credit George W. Bush with preventing another 9/11, when his administration could not even properly identify our enemies? Calling the struggle in which we find ourselves a “war on terror” is like calling World War II a “war on blitzkrieg,” or a “war on kamikaze.” Terror is a means to an end, not our enemy. Our self-declared enemy is the socio-political ideology of Islam, a fascist system whose adherents believe themselves to be superior to all who do not share their belief. They offer us three options: (1) Convert to Islam; (2) Live at the mercy of a dictator as a powerless underclass; or (3) Die in the war of conquest long ago declared against us. Unless we are Jews, of course, in which case our options are mostly narrowed to (3).
The Republicans’ political malpractice over the last few presidential terms has left us in debt up to our scalps, in danger of being overrun by illegal aliens, and in a fight for our lives with an enemy that our government cannot even identify, much less understand. It has left us in the hands of a devout socialist who is a “made man” product of Chicago machine politics, and a senate hack with not much going on underneath his hair plugs, other than the incubation of his next verbal gaffe.
If any of the Republican “leaders” who brought us this debacle are still in their positions of power and influence in Congress in 2012, we get the point. It will be an unambiguous indicator that the Republican Party is destined for obscurity, and deserving of nothing but contempt from the conservatives at the grassroots who have labored for decades to keep it alive.
The Stupid Party, that party of abused political hookers and back-stabbing weasels, will have made it clear to even the most loyal conservatives that we need to go elsewhere to find principled leadership.
Tom Cox
November 7, 2008
(Revised, March 5, 2011)