The Republican Dictatorship

The right-wing political movement spent all of the 1990s claiming to distrust governmental power and even printing bumper stickers like this to prove it:

Key quote: Few things are more striking than the gap between the actual power-expanding behavior of Republicans when in office and the manipulative limited-government rhetoric they spew when they want to win elections or attack Democrats. What Republicans claim to despise when they are out of power is exactly what they do when they are in power.

I was expecting good things from the Bush administration in 2001 but I was a little nervous about the phrase "compassionate conservatism". It (compassionate) was an unnecessary qualifier because conservatism, in the sense I understood it, meant fair treatment for everyone.