It's not that I hate all Republicans...

The Times has an editorial this morning about "The New Republicans". The premise of the article is not particularly new -- ever since the Republican Party allied itself with the Religious Right it has steadily lost philosophical coherence. Republicans used to be about hands-off government, fiscal conservatism, and anti-federalism.

This Republican administration, says The Times, is changing all that. These are not your father's Republicans. Says the Times:

This, it appears, is what compassionate conservatism really means. The conservative part is a stern and sometimes intrusive government to regulate the citizenry, but with a hands-off attitude toward business. The compassionate end involves some large federal programs combined with unending sympathy for the demands of special interests. If only it all added up.

I suppose the Times Editorial page was too timid to suggest this, but there is is a way in which it all adds up:

The current administration's domestic policies are incoherent because they do not, strictly speaking, have domestic policies at all. Their domestic policies are little more than a means to advance their political goals: winning, and winning big.

Bear with me here, I'm about to unearth some ancient (year-old) history. Remember John DiIulio, the squeaky-clean super-smart guy the administration tapped to run its faith-based initiatives program? Remember the flap last year about his on-the-record contributions to an Esquire article written about Karl Rove? Here's a man who wrote a detailed, seven-page, on-the-record memo blasting the Bush administration for having absolutely no interest in policy whatsoever.

Let's review some of the things he said:

[Circumstances] gave rise to what you might call Mayberry Machiavellis -- staff, senior and junior, who consistently talked and acted as if the height of political sophistication consisted in reducing every issue to its simplest, black-and-white terms for public consumption, then steering legislative initiatives or policy proposals as far right as possible. These folks have their predecessors in previous administrations (left and right, Democrat and Republican), but, in the Bush administration, they were particularly unfettered.

And

Translating good impulses into good policy proposals requires more than whatever somebody thinks up in the eleventh hour before a speech is to be delivered, or whatever symbolic politics plan -- "communities of character" and such -- gets generated by the communications, political strategy, and other political shops.

The letter is that of a disappointed but hardly vindictive man who was truly concerned about the Administration. DiIulio later issued an apology for having written the letter (I'm quoting the National Review's article on the subject, believe it or not..):

Shortly afterward, in the face of a deep-freeze reaction from the White House, DiIulio went into full retreat. "My criticisms were groundless and baseless due to poorly chosen words and examples," he said in a statement. "I sincerely apologize and I am deeply remorseful. I will not be offering any further comment, or speaking or writing further on any aspect of my limited and unrepresentative White House experience or any matters or persons related thereto. I regret any and all misimpressions. In this season of fellowship and forgiveness, I pray the same."

The National Review does not attempt to defend the White House against DiIulio's criticisms. It instead points out that "DiIulio's White House experience was quite a long time ago...and that's the problem with his confessions to Esquire."

The White House has since made efforts to paint itself as heavy-on-policy, thank-you-very-much. But I'm not buying.
From where I'm sitting, it still appears that the White House's main interest in domestic policy is using it to hand out favors to those who finance the re-election campaign and throw bones to the radical right's radical agenda.

If you can add it up some other way, please do let me know.