Good lord. If anybody has any doubts about the lack of a real conservative in the White House for the last eight years, let Michael Gerson remove them. He was a speechwriter for President Bush and now says this in a column:
For all of conservatism's evident virtues, it can have one furtive, seedy vice: A justified suspicion of government can degenerate into an anti-government ideology -- rigid, stingy and indifferent to human suffering.
That's the justification for "compassionate conservativsm" in a nutshell, and it's a crock. Is it rigid and stingy to lament the fact that government has grown as much under Republican rule as it did under the Democrats? Is it being indifferent to human suffering to protest billions being thrown at the same problems that billions have already been spent on to no demonstrable effect? Republicans are going to lose the White House this year and face huge Democratic majorities in both the House and Senate. And they deserve it all.
