God, Michael “Juvenile Catchphrase” Gerson is an annoying twat. Ever since the Bush Administration began unmistakably spiraling the drain, he’s been on a crusade to make his career to date look like not as much of a mistake as it has unquestionably been. In particular, he’s given himself the Sisyphean task of defending “compassionate conservatism” against both its obvious moral bankruptcy and its critics on the right who prefer their conservatism undiluted by any weakening additives.

After offering an obligatory sneer at Obama and liberals that is totally unrelated to the entire rest of his column, he decides to respond to right-wingers who object to the oxymoronic term the Bushies prefer over the more descriptive “cancerous moral perverts” that the rest of the world applies to them:

There is, in fact, a long, respectable conservative tradition of modifying or replacing the word “conservatism.” We have seen, in various eras, the coinage of Tory Democracy, progressive conservatism, neoconservatism and national greatness conservatism. And there is a reason for this — because not “every” conservatism has shown an equal concern for the “condition of the people.” Not the slaveholding conservatism of John C. Calhoun, which somehow found torture, rape and stolen labor to be a defensible part of the natural order. Not the isolationist conservatism before World War II that would have left Britain to face evil alone. Not the segregationist conservatism that defended the tradition of humiliating your neighbor. Such “conservatisms” merit hostility.

More recently (and in an entirely different league of moral offensiveness), there is also the Republican libertarianism of former representative Dick Armey, who once declared Medicare “a program I would have no part of in a free world.” And of fiscal conservatives who proposed to delay the Medicare prescription drug benefit, or eliminate the president’s global AIDS initiative, as an offset for spending on Hurricane Katrina relief.

So, modern conservatives just have absolutely nothing to do with the conservatives who defended slavery and segregation - notwithstanding the inconvenient fact that, in many cases, they’re the same conservatives. This, for some reason, despite conservatism’s central ideology of allegiance to the past and the preservation of its own traditions - today’s conservatives just wandered in from a YAFF ballot-stuffing party and were shocked, shocked to discover their elders had had some kind of embarrassing ideas about race. Suddenly, slavery is bad - while just a few years ago conservatives were still arguing that blacks were lucky to have been slaves, and the Civil Rights Movement was a mistake. And suddenly it’s, maybe, a bit hard-hearted to always cut life-saving health and emergency-relief programs for “other priorities”, when the GOP has been screaming for decades about the need to destroy the “peace dividend” (remember when we had one - back before we started all those wars?), eliminate the Social Security Trust Fund, and drown the government in a bathtub.

It’s certainly lucky that the GOP - in fact, the individual members of the GOP - can simply renounce their own past so easily. Now they’re the new, unblemished, conservatives without a past - except that “kinder, gentler” conservatism was proclaimed by George H.W. Bush in 1987, and “compassionate conservatism” in 1992, by Bush puppetmaster Marvin Olasky in his book The Tragedy of American Compassion (the title is not ironic - remember, he’s a conservative). It was these 20-years-on new conservatives who were the ones who tried to kill Medicare and Social Security, voted to defund the only semi-decent thing George Bush ever did (the African AIDS bill), and deliberately watched New Orleans die. So the new compassionate conservatives are going to rise above the mistakes and malignancies of the old compassionate conservatives, who are . . . themselves, and are thus innocent of those mistakes and crimes because they choose to be.

Because saying so makes it so, and everything is someone else’s fault when you’re a conservative.