I’ve never been a big fan of the phrase “compassionate conservative.” When Bush bandied it about in 2000, I was so put off I actually cast a protest vote for John McCain in the Republican primary. Bush never said exactly what he meant by “compassionate conservative,” so I figured that the very best he could be doing was to say “I’m a conservative, but pleeeeaaaase don’t hate me for it.” Or maybe, as I long suspected, the “compassionate” modifier was there to signal that he wasn’t really a conservative at all, just a conservative-with-an-asterisk. Worst of all, maybe he thought there was something “uncompassionate” about traditional conservatism. I wasn’t sure what he meant, but was pretty sure that whatever he meant, it couldn’t be good.

Now, I’ve come full circle. I still don’t much care for the phrase “compassionate conservative,” but for very different reason: it’s redundant. Yes, there are some non-compassionate conservatives out there, and yes, there are some compassionate non-conservatives as well. But increasingly, the number of people who are either both compassionate and conservative, or neither, appears to be growing exponentially.

Start with the Republican convention, where the words “conservative” and “compassion” were both used quite a bit, in most cases independently of one another. Meanwhile, countless leftist decried as “liars” almost every veteran who served on a Swift Boat other than John Kerry and his incredibly shrinking band of brothers, Matthew Yglesias deliberately misunderstood Arnold Schwarzenegger’s speech, and the normally sensible Susan Estrich went Orwellian and called for the already-nasty liberal brigade to stop being so nice. Then, barely a day passed before either Scott Lindlaw or Tom Hays (Hays, I think) of the Ass. Press falsely smeared a group of Republicans for supposedly booing at President Bush’s compassionate words for Bill Clinton. But where most of the MSM failed to find any real examples of anti-Clinton nastiness to exploit, the New York Post found one such example: Kathleen Willey. Well congratufrickinlations to the mental giant who shoved a mike into her face. In response, Jeralyn “Classy” Merritt is blames the victim by dishonestly describing Willey as “the young widow (since remarried) who accused Clinton of coming onto her,” and then chiding her for making a “tasteless, base comment.” Apparently, Ms. Merritt expected a more conciliatory statement from Willey, like maybe something along these lines:

Oh, that poor deary. Sure, he may have sexually assaulted me on what was already one of the hardest days of my life, when my husband had just committed suicide, but he’s not such a bad guy. Let’s put the past behind us and wish our former President a speedy recovery, OK?

Sorry, toots, but that’s the kind of answer you can expect from a mystical Mother Teresa type; its not realistic to expect it from Kathleen Willey, Juanita Broaddrick, or any of President Clinton’s other real-life victims, past or present. All the “liar, liar pants on fire” rhetoric was bad enough, but this post was beyond the pale, if indeed there ever was a pale to begin with. With apologies to my friends Patterico and The Other Xrlq, I hereby declare Talk Left a class-free zone. The good news for Ms. Merritt herself, and for her cheering section, is that from now on, all of her lies, half-truths and quarter truths will have one less reader to refute them.

Spoons said it best: “Liberalism — it’s not just a political philosophy, it’s a mental disorder.”