The first shot has been fired in the War Against Truth (post-GWB). Michael Gerson is an op-ed writer at the Post, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and was the Dear Leader’s speechwriter from 2001 to June 2006. He also has the one thing essential to working for Bush - he’s a religious whackjob.

So now that the only thing Bush gives a shit about is his legacy and clearing brush, what sort of nonsense will flow from the pens of the Loyal Bushies? Gerson provides an example in today’s WaPo - let’s check it out, shall we?

It is conventional wisdom that Bush’s idealism is either a fraud or has been pushed aside completely by the priorities of war.

[...]

My goal is a humbler assessment: Did President Bush, in the course of seven years, cast aside compassion and become the “same kind of Republican”?

How many Iraqis has his little war killed? Something like 500,000? Gerson probably doesn’t take them into account - they were brown.

And remember this?

Yes indeed … that’s the Dear Leader pretending to play a guitar the day after Katrina hit.

Let’s press on.

The answer is no. Proposals such as No Child Left Behind, the AIDS and malaria initiatives, and the addition of a prescription drug benefit to Medicare would simply not have come from a traditional conservative politician. They became the agenda of a Republican administration precisely because of Bush’s persistent, passionate advocacy. To put it bluntly, these would not have been the priorities of a Cheney administration.

This leaves critics of the Bush administration with a “besides” problem. Bush is a heartless and callous conservative, “besides” the 1.4 million men, women and children who are alive because of treatment received through his AIDS initiative… “besides” the unquestioned gains of African American and Hispanic students in math and reading… “besides” 32 million seniors getting help to afford prescription drugs, including 10 million low-income seniors who get their medicine pretty much free. Iraq may have overshadowed these achievements; it does not eliminate them.

Let’s pretend for a second that Bush’s AIDS initiative wasn’t bogged down with ridiculous abstinence restrictions. Let’s pretend that No Child Left Behind hasn’t been a failure. Let’s also pretend that the prescription drug thingy wasn’t needlessly complicated and of dubious utility.

Let’s talk about a president responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, a man who left a major American city to rot. Forced his religion on the citizenry. Fiscal mismanagement. Out of control spending, mostly on pointless wars. Politicized the government. Hired his friends’ and their college roomates to run important agencies. Vetoed SCHIP. Packed the federal bench with reactionary morons. Outed a CIA agent. Voter caging and purging. Secret prisons. Torture. Ignored global warming. Wrecked the environment. Altered scientific data. Destroyed evidence. Ridiculous levels of secrecy. Suppressed all dissent. Signing statements. Gutted the 4th amendment. And on and on.

Who could have predicted, Mr. Gerson, that a spoiled, petulant, stubborn, insensitive man would turn out to be such a “compassionate” president? Who indeed.

Compassionate to the End [Washington Post via Shakesville]