If President Bush can't see that abject failure, if he truly believes that this is his legacy, one is left to seriously consider his grip on reality. I have no doubt that he means what he says in the interview and that he really, truly believe this will be one of his great legacies. That is what makes his quote frightening. That he continues to believe this against despite the bottomless gulf between what he believes and reality is really frightening.
Q But I'm talking about ideology. You have Reagan Republicans today. Are there -- will there be Bush Republicans, and can you define the ideology of a Bush Republican?THE PRESIDENT: Compassionate conservatism, the use of government to help people in the private sector advance compassionate goals, like the faith-based initiative....
As I documented in Tempting Faith and wrote here for Beliefnet in 2005, Bush's "compassionate conservatism" and the faith-based initiative have been among the great charades of the modern presidency. The effort's failures have been so vast (promises of $8 billion a year targeted to help faith-based and secular 'community' organizations have resulted in less 10% of that over the last six years; cuts of more than 100 domestic policy programs; scores of billions in funding cuts for anti-poverty programs; Katrina) virtually no objective observer in Washington calls the efforts a success, let alone something that would inform an ideology. It isn't a close call. That he can't - or won't - see that does not bode well for the rest of his presidency and should motivate us to pray ever harder for him as our president.
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As I type this, I am watching The Worst President Ever lead a "press conference" heaped with his hubris, ignorance and jingoism. It is nauseating that this man is President of the United States. And it is even more nauseating still that venomous far right "Coulter Christian" ideologues would have us believe he is a man of God in any way shape or form.
Stephen Davidson, did you even read the post? Your "reply" doesn't even touch on the point being made.
It's slightly surprising that Bush is still talking about "compassionate conservatism", because this was never really anything more than a slogan, standard deceptive marketing. ("Reactionary -- with a vengeance!" didn't do too well with the focus groups, I guess.) But other than that, it's long been evident that this administration is simply impervious to external reality, and will ALWAYS turn to comforting orthodoxy when inevitable difficulties arise. In this sense, they're really much more like 1920's Bolsheviks than anything else.
>...the use of government to help people in the private sector...
This is NOT the function of the government. The proper use of government is to help people in the public sector, not private. This is a public government. Bush doesn't know one correct idea of what America is about at any level.
If President Bush thinks "Faith based funding" is the center of his legacy, he's talking about institutionalizing discrimination in federally-funded programs--taking us backward by almost a century. And as recently documented (http://sexualintelligence.wordpress.com/), the Supreme Court is on the verge of declaring his whole Christian gravy-train ediface unconstitutional.
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