Compassionate Conservatism and other observations

Jon Swift defines compassionate conservatism for us in his wonderful blog:

Compassionate conservatism isn't about catering to whiners' every whim. It's about deeply sympathizing with peoples' problems and sincerely hoping that private enterprise will be able to do something about them. I don't think you can ask anything more from government than that.

I don't think anyone has ever explained it better.

Of the situation in New Orleans, he notes

Just as they ignore all of the successes in Iraq, the media refuses to acknowledge that all of the amazing progress on the Gulf Coast since Hurricane Katrina has been due to the President's remarkable leadership. From the way the glass-half-empty pundits spin the situation there you would never know how great things are actually going. A year ago much of New Orleans was under water but now it is as dry as any other American city. After Katrina there was no electricity, except for a brief moment when the President gave his speech in Jackson Square, but now only a year later power has been restored to more than 50% of residents. Before Katrina many people lived in ramshackle houses in some of the poorest areas of New Orleans, but those hovels are steadily being replaced with shiny new trailers and mobile homes. What homes were not destroyed have skyrocketed in value bringing potential financial windfalls to their owners. And the person who perhaps lost the most because of Hurricane Katrina, Trent Lott, whose 19th century mansion was reduced to rubble, is well on his way to rebuilding a new and bigger mansion as soon as his lawsuit against his insurance company makes it through the courts. All in all there is no denying that things are trending upward for people in the Gulf region.

And then there is the End of Science:

Not only are scientists responsible for bad things like the Holocaust, they are always trying to scare us about bad things that don't exist like global warming. Frankly, it's a wonder scientists have any credibility at all considering how they are always trying to terrify us with alerts of threats that don't pan out and lying about things that turn out not to exist. Only a scientific dead-ender could think that anything scientists say should be believed. I'm glad the Bush Administration has done something about it, fighting the War on Science with the same fervor it has brought to the War on Terror and the War in Iraq and all of the other wars it has declared.

Now that two of my least favorite subjects in school, science and history, are dead, I'm hoping that the Bush Administration will redouble its efforts to kill off two other subjects I didn't much care for, Math and Geography. While important strides have been made, I still think more can be done to send Math and Geography to the dustbin of History, which, course, has itself been sent to the dustbin of . . . something else, I guess. I'm not ready to declare victory until our schools are teaching only two subjects: Religion and Gym.

Read him. He's really funny.

And yes, my dear conservative friends, it IS satire. Because no one in their right....err, no one who is sane could actually believe all these things, correct?