2007-08-03 Five Values Ann Coulter Lacks -- Part Two: Compassion

by NacGump

As I noted last time, Ann Coulter and her ilk lack honesty, meaning not just that they tell lies, but that honesty isn't a core value for them.

I also pointed out that my notion of these five values is that they form a sort of moral curriculum, a sequence. Honesty, not only with others but also with oneself, is the foundation. The very next value is compassion, for without a basic sense of compassion for other people, other living things, perhaps in a sense for the grand order of the universe, then mere honesty leaves you potentially as a mere witness, clear-eyed, but with no means by which to judge things or to make decisions.

Now, compassion is an interesting term in American politics since 2000, because the most fundamental broken promise of the Bush administration is to be compassionate as well as conservative. Of course, Karl Rove is the particular type of liar for whom all of these words mean nothing, but he is also the type of liar smart enough to know that this oxymoron was exactly the right slogan to allay people's fears, as it intimated a pledge that the administration would steer clear of the "worst" aspects of conservatism -- oh, things like stripping away American civil rights, raiding the treasury and stealing from the poor and the middle class to further remunerate one's already Midas-rich "base," and spreading hatred and violence far and wide.

We know now, and Katrina is the "poster child" event that triggered our knowledge, that there is no compassion in George Bush or Dick Cheney, at least, nothing of the regular, pure and simple compassion that would be recognizable to a child in the third grade. Even their lip service to anything and anyone that isn't a part of their plutocratic power core is slim.

That basic third-grade compassion is that impulse we have to root for the underdog in the teen movie who's up against the popular kids, led by the captain of the football team who drives a Porsche to school and beats the crap out of our hero. Bushies, on the other hand, love the bully. It might be in secret, but they just love that scene where the football captain's friends hold our hero's arms while the football captain lands major gut punches. In the core of a Karl Rove, a Dick Cheney, a George Bush, or an Ann Coulter, there's a huge fan of the football captain who's chanting, "Hit 'em again, hit 'em again: harder! harder!" Cheney is sitting there when there's the close-up of our hero's bloodied face, and Cheney mutters, "Hey, why didn't you get a crowd of guys together?"

From a psychological point of view, this is because Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, and George Bush are all cowardly little girls and, well, Ann Coulter would break her spoiled little wrists punching out Elmo. This type of wimp, the type Al Franken calls "chicken hawks," exploit their enormous power, rather than being responsible stewards of it, because their own personal "powers," whether of the body, of the psyche, or of the soul, are so desperately lacking.

Without compassion, of course, you have no civilization. The savagery of Darfur is the breakdown of basic human compassion. So is the commitment of the American treasury and American lives to a war that was launched for exactly the same reason that taxes were cut for the wealthy, that corporations now control all regulatory agencies, that there is opposition to the only type of health care system that makes sense in a modern country -- a single-payer system that cuts the parasitical insurance industry out entirely, and most desperately for the same reason that the Bush administration is still trying hard to make us ignore the fact that we probably have a very small window of time before we have ruined the planet's ability to sustain human life: greed.

Greed is the opposite of compassion, and at least in this administration's track record there is nothing to suggest -- NOTHING -- that 'conservative' means anything other than "greedy."

"Compassionate conservative," therefore, has been proven to be a nonsense phrase, like "hot cold" or "green red" or "up down" ... It was just the first of many Orwellian verbal constructions concocted by Rove et. al., but all the others, pretty much, rest on this evil foundation.

NEXT UP: RESPECT