Compassionate conservatism was never a philosophy; it was a "philosophy"

Jesus was a "philosopher," Bush's favorite. It was not Boltzmann, Reichenbach, Grunbaum, and van Fraassen but rather Jesus who conducted seminal research into entropy and temporal anistropy. Jesus is also the true author of the so-called "Aristotle's" Posterior Analytics. Prior to Kant, Jesus understood that time is the location of both actual and possible events, and also developed the transcendental deduction for establishing the reality of the categories. Two millennia before Kant or Quine, Jesus worked through the problems of the analytic/synthetic distinction, and before Peirce he invented the notion of phaneroscopy and studied the nature of the dynamical object. Prior to Hume, Jesus also disproved Paley's inane argument about the watchmaker / creator analogy suggesting intelligent design throughout the universe. To top it off, Jesus also wrote the lyrics to "Surf's Up."

These are some of the reasons George Bush immediately listed Jesus as his favorite philosopher (personally, I think the admiration stems especially from Jesus' rejection of eliminative materialism in philosophy of mind), except for the dumb-ass intelligent design bit.

But what happens when Jesus' political philosophy of "compassionate conservatism" runs afoul of devastating weather, creates a larger poverty class and increasingly rich friends and family, and produces tens of thousands of dead people all around the world?

I think a certain somebody hasn't been reading his Jesusian political philosophy and ethics carefully enough....

Here, in Slate, is the epitaph of Bushian compassionate conservatism, already summed up by Bill Clinton in 1999:

This compassionate conservatism has a great ring to it, you know. It sounds sooo good. And near as I can tell, here's what it means: It means, "I like you. I do. And I would like to be for the patients' bill of rights, and I'd like to be for closing the gun show loophole, and I'd like not to squander the surplus and, you know, save Social Security and Medicare for the next generation. I'd like to raise the minimum wage. I'd like to do these things. But I just can't. And I feel terrible about it."