Dowd ran the 2004 campaign around security fears, arguing that voters "trust this president more than they trust [flip-flopping] Senator Kerry on Iraq". Now he tells us he was wrong. Wow, you don’t see that happen every day, and kudos to Dowd for his courageous statements. I’m quite sure they had nothing to do with the fact that the Bush administration is about to ship his son Daniel over to Iraq. I also doubt that fact has anything to do with why Daniel’s father now says "I do feel a calling of trying to re-establish a level of gentleness in the world". I agree that’s a pretty good idea, Matt. I even thought it was a good idea in 2004.
These are all great examples of concerned conservative compassion, but my true favorites are the ones regarding criminal justice values. You know, like Rush Limbaugh, who regularly rails on about how we should string up druggies and how there’s nothing wrong with denying due process to those bad people incarcerated at Guantánamo. How different was his tune when ‘prosecutorial zealousness’ and bias led to his arrest for drug abuse, and when he was, I’m pretty sure, glad to have a high-priced lawyer, appellate courts, and the right to throw bail. Then there was Bob Ney and Mark Foley entering alcohol rehab programs after being exposed as thieves and perverts. Gosh, whatever happened to that old time religion of ‘personal responsibility’? Or how about Bush administration insider David Safavian pleading for leniency from the court before being sentenced to 18 months for corruption in the Abramoff case. Leniency? I don’t remember seeing a lot of that in the conservative playbook. You mean like for indigent African American convicts, former abused children one and all, shipped off to death row without even competent counsel? That kind of leniency?
Now comes the visage of Alberto Gonzales, the highest ranking law enforcement officer in the land. Back in the day, the "Judge" (as he likes his staff to call him) was the plausible deniability guy for a Texas governor named Bush. Gonzales would give Bush the most wonderfully brief and narrow summaries of death row clemency appeals that could possibly be put together and, amazingly, Bush would always deny them. This was all done in the name of getting tough on law and order, mind you. Now the Attorney General’s former top staffer has testified before Congress that Gonzales lied about his involvement in firing prosecutors for political reasons. Records released so far also prove he’s lied. And another top staffer has taken the Fifth to avoid testifying at all. It kinda looks like Gonzales is going down, doesn’t it? And I’m just guessing, but I bet that when he seeks a pardon from the president for his crimes, he’ll be thankful that he himself is not writing the brief.
Anyhow, you get the picture here? Me, I’m thinking about renouncing my silly moral hangups about truth and all that junk, and just going with the genetic story after all, ‘cause it seems so damn true! Is there any doubt but that conservatives are simply missing the compassion gene? Nancy Reagan couldn’t give a damn about your specific healthcare problem until it became her problem, then she figured it out – but only that. Don’t hold your breath waiting for enlightened leadership on Social Security, a living wage or even general healthcare delivery from the wife of the president who couldn’t even mouth the word "AIDS" while the disease was beginning its march to the sea in the 1980s, taking out a wide swath of Americans along the way.
Matthew Dowd not only sold us a lying president and his prevarications about war just three years ago, but he built an entire campaign around an even more egregious lie – that his candidate was a war hero, and that the other candidate, an actual war hero, was a weak imposter. Now, as his own misdeeds loom up with the potential to bite him back hard, like some figure out of Shakespeare or a Greek tragedy, he finds doubt and regret. Doubt? Regret? I tell you what, man, you go drink down one percent of the blood you’ve spilled, first. You go apologize on your hands and knees to one percent of the families you’ve decimated. You go pay back one percent of the treasure you’ve wasted – money needed for healthcare and education. Then come tell us your self-serving tales of doubt and regret. Because, funny, somehow we never got that vibe from you in 2004.
If it seems like conservatives are congenitally incapable of compassion until they’ve had to struggle with something themselves, that’s because it’s true. If you think the whole business of wealthy Americans demanding additional tax cuts for themselves to pay for their third yacht while others go to bed hungry is part of the same mentality, that’s because it is. If you’re horrified that people are capable of such rampant hypocrisy, you ought to be. This is truly a scary bunch, with the full intellectual firepower of adults, but with social ethics that could make the dynamics of a kindergarten sandbox seem positively Gandhian by comparison.
And that leaves we more enlightened grown-ups with just two choices. We could make sure that every conservative in the White House or Congress loses a child in Baghdad, has another one shot-up with the assault rifles the NRA defends, contracts AIDS, gets wrongly accused of a capital offense and is forced to take a court-appointed drunken lawyer getting paid $6.75 and hour and sleeping during court, is forced to live off a Wal-Mart wage, gets kicked off the voting rolls because of their race, lives in New Orleans and depends on FEMA for housing assistance, gets knocked-up and has to figure out how to deal with an unplanned pregnancy, gets stomped to a bloody pulp because of their sexual orientation, and has to cope by themselves with a parent whose mind has been destroyed by Alzheimer’s. That’s one alternative. And wouldn’t they (and, more importantly, we) be better off for it?
Or, better yet, we could instead make sure that there simply are no more conservatives in the White House or Congress. Progressives, and especially Democrats, need to regain the courage of their convictions, and stop standing by as passive observers while these emotional midgets with their constipated compassion capacities kick our sorry political asses up and down the street. People don’t want the garbage they’re selling, and just about all we have to do is point out that it is garbage in order for it to be rejected.
Right now, regressives are peddling a lovely mix of war, debt, environmental destruction, torture, division at home, hatred abroad, a tattered constitution, a shaky economy and a healthcare system in free-fall, as well as lies and corruption that could make Imelda herself blush. How is it these guys even exist? How is it they are even allowed within a hundred yards of government buildings? Is there a shortage of ankle bracelets? Even if they were Iraqi suicide bombers blowing up government they couldn’t begin to equal the damage they’ve already done in government.
If emotionally-stunted regressives can’t get to compassion on their own, maybe they can learn from the lesson of Lee Atwater, the man whose major contribution in life was to inject a pure and virulent fresh dose of racism into American politics via the Willie Horton ad. Imagine having that as the first line of your three-line obit. (But, hey, it resulted in that really great George H. W. Bush presidency, so it was worth it, right?) When he later got a brain tumor, Lee at last found that elusive compassion thing and apologized on his death bed. Like Matthew Dowd, Atwater’s timing was impeccable. And like Dowd, his completely altruistic absence of a motivating self-interest was plain for anyone to see.
I don’t wish retribution on even those who have brought harm to the rest of us, and, anyway, surviving and then reacting to regressive policies is about as clear a lose-lose scenario as one could possibly manufacture. Better that we simply stand our ground, match decibel to decibel, stratagem to stratagem, and hope that the integrity and validity of our arguments are sufficient to win the policy debates of the day. (And if they’re not, well, then Marx was right: people get the government they deserve.)
There was a reason that Bush the Monster dressed up for Halloween as a so-called compassionate conservative in 2000. It’s the same reason that Bush Who Spawned the Monster tried to pitch himself as a kinder, gentler conservative in 1988. In both cases it had to be sold, because who would believe it otherwise? Between Reagan, Gingrich and the rest, Americans had seen the face of conservatism all too clearly. Those who live in fear happily lined-up right behind those who trafficked in it. Those who knew better rightly identified this regressive conservatism for the political carcinogen that it is. It was those in-between who could perhaps be persuaded by such an adeptly crafted marketing slogan.
At least Poppy Bush didn’t lie (about that). He was actually kinder and gentler. Than Reagan! That wasn’t exactly difficult to do. But his mutant progeny pulled the ultimate bait-and-switch. By 2001, the compassionate conservative of just one year earlier had become the catastrophic conservative with which we’re all now so well acquainted.
I will be haunted forever by Cindy Sheehan’s description of her family’s meeting with him to acknowledge the loss of her son, Casey. This was before Cindy Sheehan became Cindy Sheehan. Bush comes bounding into to the room, all frat-boy jovial and wise-cracking, asking "Okay, who’s the mom here?", and glibly continuing to refer to Cindy throughout as "Mom". The family is shocked and astonished by his callousness. He, on the other hand, is completely unable to make even the remotest connection to their grief, and this is even before they would come to lay that grief at his doorstep. They try to show him pictures of Casey and he refuses to look, quickly withdrawing from the room, and then more famously later refusing to meet with her at all.
This is the true face of the regressive conservatism that has invaded our polity today, and we should call it for what it is. Does this sound familiar?: "a pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others". How about this?: "having little regard for the feeling and welfare of others". These are defining terms for antisocial personality disorder, better know by its predecessor label for those so diseased: sociopath.
Note that "People with this disorder may exhibit criminal behavior", and symptoms may include "not learning from experience, no sense of responsibility, inability to form meaningful relationships, inability to control impulses, lack of moral sense, emotional immaturity, lack of guilt and self-centeredness". No kidding. Really?
