President George W. Bush campaigned for office as "the compassionate conservative". Many would question his compassion and his conservatism in the real sense of the world, and reality suggests that the only recipients of compassion of this man are wealthy and superwealthy political conservatives.
President Bush’ associates and collaborators have tried to shield the President from accountability for the various atrocities and war crimes and evil misdeeds carried out in his "War on Terror" by blaming subordinates, usually at the lowest possible level. But the more we learn, the more we see how the compassionate conservative wages war and then tries to hide from accountability.
For instance, we have learned from insiders in the adminstration how Bush approached the "Iraq problem" during the first days of his entering into office. Did Bush request of his advisors: "How can we be compassionate to Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi people, since we have caused them so much pain and death and suffering to date"? Absolutely not! Bush told his administration, including the intelligence agencies and military advisers and leaders " Build me a case for war". Bush did not ask if an honest analysis of the intelligence made a case for war. He said "BUILD ME A CASE FOR WAR." One term used now to describe what was done was "cherry-picking" of intelligence data to arrive at a conclusion that favored a predetermined result by ignoring all evidence to the contrary of the desired one. The President, the compassionate one, wanted to destroy and colonize Iraq, and he used the old Reagan administration technique of "perception management" to dupe the American Congress and the American people into supporting a war that was unsupportable based on the facts. A case was manufactured using lies by Chalabi and Wolfowitz and Perle and others. The key point of all of this is that this was done AT THE REQEST of the "compassionate conservative", Bush himself, and he was not a victim of the process. Bush set the rules of the game, and the players played according to the rules Bush set forth.
The same is true of prisoner torture at Abu Graib and other prisons. Bush claimed early on (in the uncovering of the scandal) that low-level enlisted soldiers somehow got out of control and performed those horrific tortures on their own intitiative. BUSH KNOWINGLY LIED AGAIN. The orders and the techniques and the responsibility for prisoner torture by the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere came from the compassionate conservative. That is what happens when a compassionate conservative leads the nation to war. Bush likes to claim that he is a "wartime president" and he is, in fact, a warmongering president in an illegal war with atrocities conducted under his leadership that dwarf those of the people he calls "terrorists". Only a compassionate conservative would detain people indefinitely without trial, without charges, without access to attorneys, and without any idea of when they might be released.
Only a compassionate conservative would jail thousands and thousands of totally and factually innocent Iraqis and then torture them in order to find out if they know something about what the insurgents are doing or how they are organized. Only a compassionate conservative would jail all those innocent Iraqis and not even allow their relatives to know where they are being held or for how long. Only a compassionate conservative could justify torture in a "war against terror".
"Compassionate conservative" might very well be a euphemism for "hard hearted son of a bitch" in Bush-speak. No doubt Bush chuckles when he calls himself by either title. The record is very clear. Unfortunately, John Kerry cannot speak about these matters, because he gives evidence that he believes in compassionate conservatism, too. And so Kerry criticizes Bush for being an ineffective compassionate conservative, while Kerry wants to do evil more effectively.
