Compassionate Conservatism was a great soundbyte

But a bad idea. Conservatism is conservatism. Adding an adjective does not change what conservatism is. You can add any adjective to it and it doesn't change real conservatism. It changes how you adhere to conservatism, but not what conservatism is. Think about it why not call it Sweet Conservatism? Or Flowery Conservatism, or Puppy Conservatism, or Cookie Breath Conservatism? Or Neo-, Delicious, speedy, tensile, brown, or unpatterned? The words are essentially meaningless. Any adjective can be added, but the meaning of real conservatism doesn't change. The gradation of adherence to basic conservative principles determines the level of conservatism and not some new type of conservatism.

Both Bush Presidents were in the so-called compassionate conservative mode. But conservatism itself is compassion. It's just not marketed that way. Is welfare compassion? Not really, you are encouraging both dependence and subsistence existence (look, I went all Jesse Jackson there for a second). Teaching people to be self reliant, that's compassionate. Being a safety net instead of a permanent sleeping bag - that's compassionate. Teaching people they can achieve things on their own is compassionate - it empowers people to be free.

Sending money to starving African children is that compassionate? Yes, but you know what's more compassionate - allowing their nations to develop using fossil fuels so that they can have industries and pay for their own food and not rely on your handouts.

Giving more taxes to government to hand out - compassionate? On the surface of it. But giving them less and allowing the free market to better allocate those resources and thereby giving more people more jobs and thereby generating more money some of which can be used for charitable donations has a bigger impact on jobs and charities, that's more compassionate.

Is helping mother earth fight off the evils of man made global warming compassionate? No, it's stupid and without compassion. If you look into it, there's a huge discrepancy between the hyperbolic hysteria and the reality of climate change. We're possibly going to spend and also negate trillions of dollars in GNP for a myth. The myth is that climate change is man made and that there is anything we self righteous humans could possibly do to change it. Those trillions of dollars are being taken out of the pockets of those who earned it. I don't call that compassion, I call it theft, based on a flawed lie. It's not compassionate, it's just plain wrong.

And if you still think climate change is an inarguable truth, tell that to these people. Open your mind and don't be a mindless liberal robot. You liberals like to talk about Bush taking away people's freedoms (again, based on inaccurate hearsay), but the real problem is that your mind is so closed, you've revoked your own freedom of though a long time ago.

As Rush Limbaugh put it (and I'm paraphrasing here) liberalism is about feeling good, and feeling like you are doing good. Conservatism is about understanding what's the best good and working towards that goal. Liberalism is predicated on emotion, conservatism on logic. Therefore liberalism is an easier sell to someone who doesn't pay a lot of attention to politics. But that means conservatives have to educate before they can sell their ideas and visions. And that in turn means that for 2012 they have to start now. For 2010 they probably should have started 6 months ago, and for 2008, Bush should have started defending himself better back in 2005.