...just eight years later

While running for president in the 2000 election cycle, George Bush promised us "compassionate conservatism." It somehow seemed to suggest that conservatism as we've come to know it somehow isn't compassionate. Weird... as if voters and politicians who identified themselves as conservative were intolerant and likely to paint their opponents as morally defective. "Compassionate conservatism" somehow seemed to contrast itself with the image of a party secretly run by an evil genius who crafts a 30-year plan to ultimate and permanent political power by dividing the country into groups and convincing one group that the other group hated God, America, and cute little babies and would like nothing better than to turn all of your relatives into gay hedonists who prefer French wine and spurn NASCAR.

Turns out that the new conservatism was way more repugnant than regular-old conservatism.

But just eight years later, compassion seems to have returned to the Republican party. Today, it became widely known that the 17-year-old daughter of new GOP dream-Veep Sarah Palin is pregnant and unwed. What did the conservative establishment have to say? Remember, these are the guys who told us that the 9/11 attacks were retribution from God because of gays and who decry Dems as seedy purveyors of moral relativism. See for yourself. It appears to be... compassion. Suddenly, a whole new group of people understands that families (even important, influential ones) are just doing the best they can. People make bad choices sometimes and mess up their lives. Sometimes, they make stuff a lot more complicated for their families. And their families generally do all they can to help them out.

I'd offer my congratulations to the "moral majority" for suddenly understanding what the rest of already did, but for two things:

1. How do you imagine the far-right establishment would have reacted were one of Barack Obama's daughters of the age and situation of Palin's?
2. How would these folks have reacted had Palin publicly announced that their daughter was not going to do "the right thing" in marrying the father and having the baby?

Maybe compassion only goes so far.