We all know that George W. Bush has styled himself as a "compassionate conservative." However, this title strikes me as quite odd. Why does he need to add the caveat of "compassionate"? Is the notion of being uncompassionate somehow implicit in the notion of being "conservative"?
It occurred to me that if we look at the platform of the Republican Party, we come to the conclusion that Republicanism and compassion are mutually exclusive. In fact, to go even further, the Republican Party platform supports all the things that will significantly shorten your life. If it has a good chance of killing you, Republicans will support it.
Though it's pretty easy to compile an enormous tome of the Republican Party's iniquities when it comes to protecting "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," three major examples will do. Let's look at them according to mortality rates.
First, we have the Republican stance on tobacco. For some odd reason, Republicans actually support the tobacco industry. Sure cigarettes cause lung cancer (finally an accepted fact), but that doesn't seem to bother the Republicans. Crystal clear (as opposed to fuzzy) statistics have established that lung cancer is the leading type of cancer and that cancer is the second leading cause of death among all Americans. But Republicans are still asking, "Why exactly are they harmful again?" The party continues to question why the FDA should regulate nicotine. Maybe because it kills far more Americans each year than any other dangerous substance.
But when Sen. John McCain proposed a bill that would allow the FDA to regulate nicotine as a drug, Congress went along with the Republican Party and killed it. That same year, Congress didn't approve a deal restricting tobacco industry advertising, even though it found that those companies often marketed cigarettes to minors. How can they not realize that inhaling smoke is bad for you? Haven't we all heard on the evening news, "Firefighter hospitalized for smoke inhalation?"
While it took many years of research and much debate to establish that smoking causes death, it takes but a moment to establish the same with respect to guns. Guns kill things — that's what they are designed to do. The better its ability to kill something, the better the gun is. The greater the quantity of things it can kill in a shorter period of time, the better the gun is.
Guns have no purpose but to kill. Even though House Majority Whip Tom Delay (R-Texas) said, "Guns have little or nothing to do with juvenile violence," we should know better after Columbine and Littleton. Homicide is the second leading cause of death for Americans aged 15 to 24 across all races and the first leading cause of deaths among blacks in that same age group. Furthermore, according to Handgun Control, "More Americans were killed with guns in the 18-year period between 1979 and 1997 (651,697) than were killed in all battles in all wars since 1775 (650,858)."
Logically, because of these overwhelming statistics, you'd think Congress would make it harder for people to get guns. But it won't — not as long as Republicans are in control of it and the party remains in the NRA's pocket.
And perhaps most obviously in conflict with the Republican's "compassionate conservative" theme is George W.'s enthusiasm for capital punishment. Even if one does not consider the death penalty to be a form of state-sanctioned murder — which, by the way, some of us do — the execution rate in Texas is staggering. During George W.'s watch, no fewer than 144 people have been executed. Consider, for a moment, that Illinois instituted a moratorium on its death penalty after finding that the system had made so many mistakes. During the second debate, Bush was pleased to announce that he was sending three men to their deaths. (Actually it's only two, but the more the merrier, right?) Maybe if Bush were truly compassionate he wouldn't have executed so many people.
Compassionate conservatives? Yeah, right. As Iago says: "When devils will the blackest sins put on / They do suggest at first with heavenly shows." Daniel Ostrow is a politics major from New York. He can be reached at dtostrow@princeton.edu.
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