Feehery: America needs a tough love agenda

George H.W. Bush promised a kinder, gentler nation in his efforts to win the White House after 8 years of the Ronald Reagan. 

His son, channeling his father, came up with the phrase “compassionate conservative.”

America doesn’t need to be kinder and gentler now. Nor does it need to be endlessly compassionate. What it does need is a healthy dose of tough love.

It is not kinder or gentler to let vagrants have the run of the nicest boulevards in America’s biggest cities. The homeless crisis is a product of weak political leadership, bad legal work and fuzzy thinking from many left-wing organizations that think giving mentally-ill drug addicts tents to live in is in any way compassionate.

Our cities need to enforce their vagrancy laws. People who are obviously incapable of taking care of themselves need to be institutionalized until they get on the right drug regimen. Those families who can’t make ends meet need to get job counseling and housing. If you can’t take care of your kids, they need to be placed in loving homes that can take care of them. 

I am all for the free market and for personal freedom, but not when it means people living in the streets, trashing our neighborhoods, not paying their taxes and posing a threat to the safety of my family. 

When it comes to crime and juvenile justice reform, we need more tough love and less compassionate counseling. The flash mobs need to be stopped. These kids know what they are doing. They think they can get away with it because Democratic prosecutors have largely told them they can get away with it.

I wonder how many of those retailing giants gave money to a Black Lives Matter movement that sees this petty larceny through the lens of slavery reparations. In any event, you can’t have a civilized society when rampant thievery is omnipresent. 

Tough love is also needed when it comes to the gender dysphoria. 

There is a whole movement out there to get little kids to change their genders. The Democrats seem to be largely supportive of it and social media platforms are making many kids even more confused.

This needs to stop. Yes, some of these folks may have some real underlying medical issues that need to be addressed. But letting men compete as women in college sports is not fair to women. Why is this so hard for Democrats and for liberals to understand?

Tough love is going to come soon on our fiscal affairs. 

The gravy train is over folks. Inflation is here and it is out of control. 

The Federal Reserve at some point will be forced to raise interest rates and constrict the money supply. That won’t be pleasant for the housing market, which already suffers from supply chain issues and from a limited stock of available properties.

But policy makers are going to have to face the music too. 

We can’t keep running up trillions of dollars in debt. This is a bipartisan problem. The debt king wasn’t really any better on deficit spending than his successor, Joe Biden.

The No. 1 driver of out-of-control debt is entitlement spending, and that means senior citizens are going to have to sacrifice some of their retirement largess to keep America solvent. 

If this were the Greatest Generation, they would probably understand the need to sacrifice.  The baby boomers, though, are a different story. The most entitled generation, who would gladly see kids in masks as long as they can sing “Piano Man” at the local pub every Friday night, are going to be a hard nut to crack.

And that might expose the limits of the tough love agenda.

It is easy to be tough when it comes to somebody else’s bad behavior.

Feehery is a partner at EFB Advocacy and blogs at www.thefeeherytheory.com. He served as spokesman to former House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), as communications director to former House Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Texas), and as a speechwriter to former House Minority Leader Bob Michel (R-Ill.).