(This is an excerpt from Joe Conason's Journal, which can be found in its entirety here:)
http://www2.observer.com/observer/pages/conason.asp
"...despite personal and professional disappointments, (Mr. John) DiIulio has never doubted the President's "character and heart," describing him as "a highly admirable person of enormous personal decency
a godly man and a moral leader
. In many ways, he is all heart."
Mr. Bush must be heartsick, then, to realize how little progress he has made toward transforming either his party or his country. Current evidence suggests that whatever his fine intentions, his policies are moving America's poor and working families backward. The benefits of his administration's policies have flowed almost exclusively to the wealthiest citizens, as if he were the heartless plutocrat of Democratic caricature. The same week he and his wife visited that food bank, he neglected again to take an aggressive position on extending unemployment benefits to nearly a million families victimized by the stubbornness of the Republican Congressional leadership. The result will be more Americans who must seek charitable assistance to feed themselves and their children.
He must also be heartsick when he realizes that his party and his own administration are also moving backward. Having extended so much budgetary largesse to the richest taxpayers that the nation can only anticipate enormous deficits, his supporters and advisers are now suggesting that taxes on poor and middle-class families should be raised.
Both the Treasury Department and the Council of Economic Advisers are drafting papers that "are expected to highlight what administration officials see as a rising tax burden on the rich and a declining burden on the poor," as The Washington Post reported on Dec. 16. The next step, as The Wall Street Journal's editorial page indicated not long ago, will be to raise taxes on those "lucky duckies" at the lower end of the economic ladder."
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What evidence exists that George Bush is truly compassionate to those less fortunate? That he has 'changed the tone in Washington'? That he is a 'uniter, not a divider'?
Please show me what I seem to be missing....