Law-Abiding Criminals, Smart Idiots, and Compassionate Conservatives

Sorry, another anti-conservative rant this week. I really will get off this soon, but the midterms are still driving me crazy and I need to vent a bit.


During the run-up to the 2000 election, George W. Bush often called himself a “compassionate conservative.” The thing that made that label interesting is that it served as a differentiator, indicating that Bush was different from other conservatives.

Conservatives loved the idea that they could be identified as both conservatives and compassionate. They had been maligned as heartless for so long when the truth was that they were good people. They wanted to help those unable to work, just not those who were unwilling. They felt for people starving in other countries, but charity begins at home. They were all for saving the environment, but they needed a large SUV and they  didn’t yet know if the science for global warming was real.

Sadly, “compassionate conservative” is an oxymoron:
   -Secretly conservatives think nearly all poor people are able but unwilling to work; it’s just a scam and poor people are living high on the hog and making fools out of us all.
   -Secretly conservatives think people in other countries . . . well, they don't really think of people in other countries. And if things are so bad there, move. Just not here.
   -Secretly conservatives think you’ll get their gas-guzzling lifestyles and cars when you pry them out of their cold, dead hands. Besides, by the time the Philippines is underwater they’ll be long gone.

The definition of compassion revolves around the desire to stop the suffering of others. But conservatism is all about “What’s in it for me?” They don’t benefit from welfare, foreign aid, and that tree-hugger shit. All they know is that the government is wasting their tax dollars on programs that don’t directly benefit them. “Why are MY TAX DOLLARS paying for their food/health care/heat?”

Don’t believe it? Here’s the acid test: Find an older conservative and tell him you’re going to try to trim some money from Medicare. See how he reacts to the idea of just trimming that welfare program.

Being a liberal means being willing to do things for and care about others, even  if--no, especially if--it doesn’t benefit you. Liberals have a long record of advancing the rights of others--i.e., people not like them. Conservatives have a long record of opposing those advances, though they at least seem to come around after it's no longer okay to oppose those reforms openly. That must be what they mean when they say that conservatives worship liberals long dead.