http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05269/577768.stm

She went to bed one night and woke up a liberal
Monday, September 26, 2005

By Ruth Ann Dailey

I found out Friday that I'm a liberal.

Which radio station I set my alarm clock to each night depends on what I think I'll want to wake me up the next morning -- raucous laughter, soothing music, Monday-morning quarterbacking or weather reports.

Friday morning I woke up to one of those rock-jock laff riots -- not the kind of place I usually seek out for political insight. These are the guys, after all, who can broadcast any word in the English language -- and use the Anglo-Saxon kind with sophomoric zeal, bleeping out mere fractions of the vowels -- and then complain that we're living in frighteningly repressive times.

Whatever they lack in balance, reason and learning, they make up for by trumpeting the conventional wisdom of the day -- as when comedian Ralphie May emitted this mental flatulence on a local station Friday: "I think Americans are fundamentally liberal -- they want to help people."

Thus my epiphany: Liberal = wanting to help people, conservative = wanting people to suffer. Not to boast, but judging from my checkbook, I'm a liberal, too!

The particular way this comedian measures our desire to help -- our liberalism, if you will -- is by our willingness to help hurricane victims through the donation program he's put together. His gesture is generous, his definition quite stingy.

I've been seeing far more of this muddle-headed thinking -- or mean-spirited condescension (take your pick) -- since Katrina struck the Gulf Coast. In a recent column on the vitriolic, post-hurricane rush to judgment, my description of George W. Bush as a Christian drew considerable protest from around the country. One leftist after another -- including the increasingly rare species Evangelicalus liberalis -- wrote correctly that the test of a person's religious convictions is in his actions. As some of the Christian leftists pointed out, Jesus himself said, "By their fruits ye shall know them."

But when evaluating the sincerity of a political leader, which "fruits" do we examine? His private actions or his public policies? Since we're talking about disaster relief, do we judge him by how generous he is with his money or how generous he is with your money?

Bush ran for the presidency in 2000 as a "compassionate conservative" -- the label regrettably giving an inadvertent concession to the leftists' false and long-standing accusation that conservatives who oppose vast government welfare programs are simply stingy and uncaring. However much I regretted Bush's terminology, though, I applauded his contention that non-profit social service agencies -- and specifically faith-based programs -- do a far better job than government bureaucracies at providing life-changing assistance.

Non-profits' advantages are well-documented. They win on efficiency, by spending less on overhead than any government ever does, and they win on efficacy, by taking a holistic approach with spiritual instruction and accountability requirements that changes lives.

And Bush put his money where his mouth was. A considerable embarrassment to Al Gore, Bush's 2000 opponent, emerged when the Gores' 1997 tax returns showed only $353 -- less than 1 percent -- donated to charity from several hundred thousand dollars of income, compared to George Bush's multi-year giving record of 2 to 16 percent.

This is far more, though, than just a debate over Bush's personal generosity. It's a question of whether virtue can be ascribed only to those who demand that we all display our virtue via the government. That assumption underlies ignorant utterances such as the radio comedian's.

Savvier politicos use similar moral posturing to gain the upper hand in policy debates. It controlled the country's approach to Great Society programs long after social scientists had demonstrated how disastrously counterproductive they were.

Today, similar rhetoric may be provoking the expensive new initiatives Bush proposes to help Katrina's victims. He may feel vulnerable to the rhetoric both because his administration's approach to the war on terror long ago overwhelmed his "compassionate conservative" agenda, and because his stewardship of his time (not his money) in the wake of Katrina was so tone-deaf that it appeared unfeeling.

It would be wrong if Bush now used federal programs -- financed by other people's money (ours) -- to prove that he is a generous, caring man. His dedicated foes aren't going to be mollified by such gestures anyway; they'll criticize him for unprecedented federal deficits.

Rather than make decisions to please the implacable, Bush should just be true to who he is -- a mean, uncaring, miserly conservative. (Please forgive my little attempt at comedy!)

Anyone know if this is true? It's hard to believe.

I have heard that some years back, don't know if it's true or not. But why are they bringing it up after eight years. That's stupidity.

And as far as what Bush donates or doesn't donate, I could care less.

With all due respect, wasn't 1998 the year Al and Tipper had to deal with their son's accident?

Maybe that affected their thinking?(as taxes are done the following year.)

OR- maybe they didn't care about the tax deduction, and didn't declare some of it?
Or just did it without thinking of tax benefits.(Like he paid for a helicopter during Katrina, do you think he worried about it being a write-off?)

They did bring this up in 2000. So this is not new news.

I believe that was the year that Al's oldest daughter got married, and the expenses for the wedding were not cheap. They cherry picked this one year, however if you take a look at the other years before and after, you will see a much larger percentage of charitable contributions from the Gores.

http://www.dailyhowler.com/h042698_1.shtml

We can’t fault Richard Cohen for the central premise of this piece; it wasn’t very smart of Vice President Gore to give so little money to charity. The Vice President gave $353 to charity in 1997 on a total income of $197,000; and in a world where every pundit goes over your records and looks for a way to trash your “character,” it would be smarter just to borrow some money and give it away, making nice with the natterers and nabobs.
But we did have to chuckle at one point in Cohen’s piece, where Cohen was discussing the awkward fact that the Gores have donated considerably more money to charity in the (very) recent past. We had to chuckle at the skillful way a top pundit will nail down his point. Cohen reports that Tipper Gore gave away $35,000 last year--royalties from her book Picture This--and also mentions that Vice President Gore recently donated $50,000 in royalties from his own book, Earth in the Balance. Truth is, we were getting dangerously close to painting a portrait of a couple who had given away a whole lot of dough. So Cohen put his thinking-cap on, and he devised this amusing construction:
COHEN: Still, without those book royalties, the Gores would have donated a whopping $883 to charity over the last two years.
Get it? What Cohen is saying here is: “If it weren’t for all the money they didgive away, they hardly gave anything away at all!” How the gods must have roared in Zeus’ great halls, delighting in Cohen’s construction!
What is especially amusing about Cohen’s flight is that his article is meant to be understanding. Understand now: this is what passes for friendlycomment by the rules of the Washington press corps! Cohen asserts that the Gores are “wonderful people,” and he mentions Tipper Gore’s efforts to comfort refugees in Zaire. But even in the midst of this type of grinning piece, the rules of the game are remorselessly clear--a pundit has to gin up constructions that will make public figures look cheesy.
Nor did Cohen exhaust his spin with the wonderful construction we’ve already cited. In his very next paragraph, he managed to come up with this:
COHEN: The figure [$883] is not only paltry, it is substantially below what USA Today says is the yearly average for people in the Gores’ income bracket--$3,379. What that says to me is not just that the Gores are not charitable people in the conventional sense but that the vice president is a political klutz.
But USA Today cited the “yearly average” given by people in the Gores’ income range. On that basis, the Gores are big givers! A yearly averageis not a yearly minimum;and on the basis of what Cohen has just finished telling us, the Gores’ “yearly average” over the past two years is almost eighteenthousand dollars! They make other folk in their class look like pikers! Isn’t it amazing--that Cohen could absent-mindedly misinterpret the basic facts that are right there in his own piece?
When Socrates was with us here in D.C., he had a jest he simply loved about the city’s surfeit of columnists (see SOCRATES READS, now in progress). “They have absolutely nothing to say,” he would tell us, “and a contractual obligation to say it two or three times a week.” We fought and fought The Great, Great Greek about the suggestion that was lodged in this comment. But now and then we read a (very average) column that does bring the comment to mind.

For the record: Cohen seems to imply, in one of the passages cited above, that Vice President Gore’s $50,000 contribution was made in the past two years. It was actually made in 1992. (Maybe USA Today didn’t have all the info.) This would mean that the Gores’ average contribution over the past six years was at least $14,000. And again, that’s an “average,” boys and girls. Here’s how you get it: You add up the totalof all the donations; then you divideby the number of years...

I believe that happened in April of 1989.

Great post, Uncle Joe. :P