The present occupant of the Whitehouse unleashed yet another salvo from the neo-con storehouse of weapons of mass deception last night in Washington, DC. One can only wonder what all the applause was about in the joint session of congress, perhaps it was in appreciation of the man’s bold and blatant contribution to the time-honored congressional practice of manipulation and deceit. Mr. Bush proclaimed “Tonight, members of Congress can take pride in the great works of compassion and reform that skeptics had thought impossible.” Out here in the real world, citizens can hardly be faulted for wondering just what compassion the man was referring to. It certainly wasn’t compassion for future generations and life on the planet. The words environment or Earth were never even uttered. Think about that. The man with the worst environmental record of any sitting president of the United States no longer even pretends to be concerned about the planet beneath his feet, the planet that sustains life. Pro-life? We don’t think so.

Nor could it have been compassion for those less fortunate than the billionaires and millionaires who back the Bush regime. Never before in the nation’s history has the refrain “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer” been truer. One might have to look back on pre-revolutionary France during the court of King Louis to see such disparity. Record deficits of nearly half a trillion dollars has even conservative Republicans worried. And, the IMF, hardly a bastion of radical economics, recently pointed out that an unrestrained drop in the dollar could have severe negative consequences both for the United States and the global economy. Think world depression.

No, the Bush regime’s “compassionate conservatism” didn’t wash in the year 2000 when the neo-cons were enthroned, and it won’t wash now. The “liberation” of Iraq was just another pretext for the expansion of empire. The only real liberating the neo-cons had in mind was the freeing up of Iraqi oil reserves for the benefit of U.S. corporados. Of course, there’s the liberating of the ever-lurking police state in the U.S. that can be credited to the Whitehouse, but one would be hard pressed to find any compassion from those quarters unless one feels that sadistic sociopath cops have been unfairly restrained for far too long by oppressive documents like the U.S. Constitution.

That pathetic 45% of U.S. citizens who are said by the pollsters to still support the Whitehouse, must be living in some twisted “reality”-television world. They are desperate for lies to believe in. Bush’s Bar “W” Moon Ranch proposal was tailor fitted for them: out-of-this-word and truly far-fetched. On the other hand, given that the Bush regime has forgotten about the need for a planet and a viable bio-sphere in order to carry out its alleged policies of compassion, it may be necessary to look toward other worlds in order to accommodate them.