More broken promises

President Bush has failed to deliver on yet another promise. I mentioned earlier how Bush made big promises to spend billions on AIDS prevention in Africa during his 2003 State of the Union speech and has so far failed to follow through with it.
This time the criticism comes from a former deputy director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives who says the Bush administration “lacks a genuine commitment to its "compassionate conservative" agenda.”

“The White House reaped political benefits from the president's promise to help religious organizations win taxpayer funding to care for "the least, the last and the lost" in the United States,” David Kuo said recently. But then the administation did not follow up and help get the funding through Congress. Kuo notes that after promising to provide tax incentives for private charitable giving during his first year in office, the administration chose to drop that provision from his $1.6 trillion tax cut legislation "to make room for the estate-tax repeal that overwhelmingly benefited the wealthy."

Of course, Kuo is not the first former Bush official coming out of the faith-based office to question the administration’s committment to its stated goals.

“In August 2001, John J. DiIulio Jr., then-director of the faith-based office, became the first top Bush adviser to quit, after seven months on the job. In an interview with Esquire magazine a year later, DiIulio said the Bush White House was obsessed with the politics of the faith-based initiative but dismissive of the policy itself.”

As I said earlier, this is just another instance of Bush’s political dishonesty - saying one thing before an election to boost his political support and then dropping it afterwards.

Although I did not support Bush for president, there once was a time when I thought he might actually accomplish some good things in office. His promises to be the “education president,” and some parts of his “compassionate conservative” agenda gave me hope that things would not be all bad under a Bush administration. Sadly, I was wrong. In nearly every case where Bush has made some promise or proposal on an issue that I found even slightly beneficial to society and the greater good - it has turned out to be as empty and meaningless as his pledge to send a manned mission to Mars.