Bush's Culture of Life?

Here are just a few ditties from recent news stories.  This government is so bad, I can no longer really read the newspapers:

WASHINGTON - Military interrogators posing as FBI agents at the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, wrapped terrorism suspects in an Israeli flag and forced them to watch homosexual pornography under strobe lights during interrogation sessions that lasted as long as 18 hours, according to one of a batch of FBI memos released Thursday.

DR Michael Mann: Director, Earth System Science Center (ESSC); Penn State Department of Meteorology, blogs at Realclimate:

"We were hearing operatives from the National Hurricane Center (NHC) repeating, as if on cue, the mantra that this was all just part of a "natural cycle" in the climate. Mind you, the peer-reviewed scientific literature was indicating just the opposite. But not a hint of that from the NHC folks. Nothing but certainty in their pronouncement that this was all part of a "natural cycle" (and thus, nothing to worry about). Surreal is the only way I can describe it."

By STEPHEN OHLEMACHER
The Associated Press
Thursday, February 23, 2006; 12:38 AM

WASHINGTON -- More than 25 million Americans turned to the nation's largest network of food banks, soup kitchens and shelters for meals last year, up 9 percent from 2001.
Those seeking food included 9 million children and nearly 3 million senior citizens, says a report from America's Second Harvest.

The Bush budget:

The president is also calling for another round of cuts to the Medicaid program, including a $12 billion reduction in Medicaid payments to states that Congress rejected last year.

Meanwhile, the budget offers $60 billion in tax breaks to encourage the use of health savings accounts (HSAs), which theoretically prompt patients to become more prudent consumers of health care services because they are playing with their own money. But these accounts are mainly available to more well-off consumers who have the resources to establish them in the first place. Some observers view Bush's HSA proposals as the health care equivalent of last year's doomed effort to promote private Social Security accounts. (The budget includes a little-noticed provision for a new Social Security privatization plan that would divert more than $700 billion of Social Security tax revenues to pay for private accounts over seven years.)

I suppose it's pointless to bring this up yet again, but if (as some have suggested) we shouldn't vote for Democrats because they are pro-choice (including within that concept support for stem cell research, etc.) and sympathetic (at least sometimes) to gay rights, and if this is the way Republicans govern (glib support for torture, affirmative hostility to environmental stewardship, and indifference to the poorest), what are Catholic voters supposed to do?  Are we supposed to turn a blind eye to this garbage and act as if this government is actually committed to Catholic values?  And if this stuff is consistent with Catholic values (because the teachings on these issues are somehow not categorical -- although that's certainly not the case with torture), then does the social teaching of the Church have any real meaning for the political sphere aside from anti-abortion and anti-gay initiatives? Is everything else in the rich Catholic social tradition just fuzzy hortatory that politicians can safely finesse with a little "compassionate conservative" rhetoric while they go about their business?