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Seamless Mush

Today, Brownback is all about the love — not just for the Clintons, but for everyone. As he mulls a long-shot bid for the White House in 2008, he is trying to reinvent the politics of compassionate conservatism for the post-Bush era. “The term ‘compassionate conservatism’ is great, but it’s basically a marketing term,” he […]

Today, Brownback is all about the love — not just for the Clintons, but for everyone. As he mulls a long-shot bid for the White House in 2008, he is trying to reinvent the politics of compassionate conservatism for the post-Bush era. “The term ‘compassionate conservatism’ is great, but it’s basically a marketing term,” he says. “I think it’s been overused in rhetoric and underutilized in public policy. I want to make it a reality.” His idea is to place love and compassion for human life at the center of everything, from the traditional issues of abortion, cloning, and euthanasia to the less traditional ones of immigration, pharmaceutical patents, and North Korea. ~John Miller

In other words, he wants bleeding heart conservatism’s heart to really bleed, and not just bleed for show.  Can someone please explain to me why this is appealing?

Nonetheless, if you can somehow get past this–and that’s not easy to do when it is the core of his campaign–it is worth remembering that he was was the one who took the lead in shutting down the Miers nomination.  Brownback is a puzzle this way: his general outlook on, say, foreign policy is Wilsonian and drippy enough to give you night terrors, but then he manages to come to the right position on the “surge” and negotiating with Syria and Iran anyway.  It’s almost as if he sometimes make the right decisions in spite of his worldview.  That’s hardly a compelling reason to support him.  Perhaps when Ross returns from his self-imposed blog exile, he can give us some compelling reasons.

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