This article explores still yet another Bush staffer who finds out via experience that the talk is mostly just that. Diulio found that out (Bush’s first “Faith-Based Initiative Czar”), who provided the widely circulated quote that , “in the Bush administration, there was an almost complete absence of a policy apparatus”. Put your money where your mouth is or SHUT IT. Anything less is pomposity and manipulation for political purposes. This seems to be, as Diulio’s quote indicates, the modu operandi of the Bush white house. All Politics, very little if any “policy apparatus”. And you have Bush himself, being “not much hof a reader”; basically, a “front-man” (and not a very effective one for doing anything else than preaching to the choir). The policies consist largely of a set of long-held, radical right, neoconservative “aims” that they have dreamt about all these years, and now they’re all abuzz at how they now have an “opportunity” to dismantle the things that always disturbed them (or, red this way: things that always “irritated” their corporate frineds and kept them from the kind of “free-market reign” —which is read by them to mean: the market will take care of it; we can do what we want; the market “benefits” from that will make us all richer. This is the driving motivation and philosophy; a PR campaign for describing the great heist of the non-upper classes by the elite, and describing it terms of “democracy and freedom” and “ownership”.

David Kuo on why Bush’s faith-based initiative has floundered — Beliefnet.com

“It is not enough to call for volunteerism. Without more support and resources, both private and public, we are asking them to make bricks without straw.”

While pure com-cons were never terribly powerful in Republican circles, Bush’s endorsement of this progressive conservatism was exciting. And when he became the president, there was every reason to believe he’d be not only pro-life and pro-family, as conservatives tended to be, but also pro-poor, which was daringly radical. After all, there were specific promises he intended to keep.

Sadly, four years later these promises remain unfulfilled in spirit and in fact. In June 2001, the promised tax incentives for charitable giving were stripped at the last minute from the $1.6 trillion tax cut legislation to make room for the estate-tax repeal that overwhelmingly benefited the wealthy