Liberal Patriot

Dusting off the fallacy - Compassionate Conservatism

J.G. Schwam - September 2, 2004

The GOP convention is dusting of the compassionate conservative line and trying to sell it again. In his last three years Bush has proven his compassion for no one, save short term profits and his rangers and pioneers.

He has schemed education funding into a morass funding shortfalls, obscure accounting procedures and distorted test results hidden under a veil of social promotions. Sixth grade students passing mandated tests at a fourth grade level are matriculated to avoid massive funding cuts. Schools that don’t have the cash to so don’t help struggling students catch up. They skew the results and pass them. This is the fallacy of “no child left behind”. They are not left behind, they just graduate that way.

They talk up their love and compassion for those sacrificing their lives in our name in Afghanistan and Iraq and expect us not to notice when they gut funding to upgrade dilapidated on base housing for their families at home. While the wives of young PFC’s, Corporal’s and Sergeants struggle to feed and clothe their young children on as little what would be $8.75 an hour if these brave young men worked a forty hour week. They pull back on the hazardous duty stipends and instead of compassion they feign embarrassment when these women often have little choice but to wait on line at off base food banks to make ends meet.

They rip apart the Veterans Administration with massive cuts while more than a million aging vets with no health insurance of their own wait months to see a doctor while they grow sicker.

They claim compassion for seniors and pass a drug bill so loaded down in confusion and fallacy that some conservatives have reported going through several so called discount plans, not finding a single one that saves them a dime or doesn’t flat cost more than the old Medicare supplemental plans that many insurance companies have since disbanded altogether.

At the same time their beloved no bid contractors run up million dollars a month dry cleaning bills and loose 75 cents a gallon on gasoline at the pump in Iraq in some weird 5 cent a gallon goodwill scheme and a submit bill of $65 thousand to deliver a fifty thousand gallon tanker. The pentagon knows they are being scammed but they pay it anyhow, knowing that they are too dependent on these crook contractors at this point in the war to go back to military personnel doing jobs they used to do for fractions of these figures.

They approve the spending of hundreds of thousands of dollars on embroidered towels for Kellog Brown and Root’s rec centers in Bahrain while they redefine the poverty line rendering hundreds of thousand of borderline families many of them soldier’s, ineligible for food stamps and Medicaid or both.

They rush to war sending troops to die day after day in unarmored Humvee’s and make them sitting ducks for snipers and grenade launchers without state of the art body armor that would save their lives.

They enrich the coffers of giant corporations with tax cuts that incentivize the sending of the manufacturing jobs of hundreds of thousand overseas, promising retraining then slashing vocational re-education funding while trying to hide the cuts under the radar.

Arnold Schwarznegger insults the true fiscal conservatives on both sides of the aisle that question the scurrilous wisdom of pilling billions on top of billions in debt, economic girlie men. While truly wise economic giants the likes of Peter Petersen founding Chairman of the Institute for International Economics and dozens of his peers virtually beg for a departure from these policies that if continued for long represent real not implied impending fiscal doom.

It is time to dust off the fallacy that the Bush administration is compassionate and conservative. Call them what the have shown they are, short term profiteers whose true agenda is to drain the US treasury, smothering the largest economy in the world under a mountain of long term debt virtually to immense to calculate at the ultimate expense of multiple generations of the ninety seven percent of Americans that earn less that $150 thousand a year ….and the world.

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