Tom DeLay, Russian Bribes, and How Not To Rally Behind the President In Wartime
Want to know why I'm not a Republican, and why at this rate I might just never vote Republican again? Well, check this out at Kleiman's digs: Tom DeLay as Proto-George Galloway. I guess I've made it clear that I'm far from wild about the Dems...but any party that would allow someone like Tom DeLay to rise to such a position of power is simply not going to get my vote except under the most bizarre of circumstances.
There's almost no way to concoct a more despicable character in American politics than Tom DeLay. If you put a character like this in a novel publishers would laugh you out of the house. Despicable, anti-democratic, authoritarian, avaricious...a flag-waving demagogue when the cameras are on, but--if these new charges are true--something very like a traitor in actual fact...
What's perhaps most bizarre about all this is that it's all so transparent. There are no real secrets here. The abject awfulness of Tom DeLay was apparent to anyone who was in any way willing to be even minimally honest about their political observations and reasonings. The Texas redistricting scheme revealed everything anyone ever needed to know about this man...but the Republicans not only tolerated it but promoted and defended it. None of these new revelations in any way diminishes DeLay in my eyes, since none of them tell me anything about the man's character that I didn't already know. These are irrelevant details in that respect. Republicans will eventually cut DeLay loose and defend themselves by arguing that they just didn't know how bad he was. That will either be a lie or it will be worse: it will show that they don't understand how nefarious DeLay's fully public sins really were.
The Republican party faces a crisis of almost unimaginable proportions. If they don't face this fact and face it soon they are lost.
Want to know why I'm not a Republican, and why at this rate I might just never vote Republican again? Well, check this out at Kleiman's digs: Tom DeLay as Proto-George Galloway. I guess I've made it clear that I'm far from wild about the Dems...but any party that would allow someone like Tom DeLay to rise to such a position of power is simply not going to get my vote except under the most bizarre of circumstances.
There's almost no way to concoct a more despicable character in American politics than Tom DeLay. If you put a character like this in a novel publishers would laugh you out of the house. Despicable, anti-democratic, authoritarian, avaricious...a flag-waving demagogue when the cameras are on, but--if these new charges are true--something very like a traitor in actual fact...
What's perhaps most bizarre about all this is that it's all so transparent. There are no real secrets here. The abject awfulness of Tom DeLay was apparent to anyone who was in any way willing to be even minimally honest about their political observations and reasonings. The Texas redistricting scheme revealed everything anyone ever needed to know about this man...but the Republicans not only tolerated it but promoted and defended it. None of these new revelations in any way diminishes DeLay in my eyes, since none of them tell me anything about the man's character that I didn't already know. These are irrelevant details in that respect. Republicans will eventually cut DeLay loose and defend themselves by arguing that they just didn't know how bad he was. That will either be a lie or it will be worse: it will show that they don't understand how nefarious DeLay's fully public sins really were.
The Republican party faces a crisis of almost unimaginable proportions. If they don't face this fact and face it soon they are lost.
posted by Winston Smith at
12:02 PM
5 Comments:
Yes, from the very beginning of Tom DeLay's career, he has been larger than life. For instance, he had possibly the least public-spirited reason in history for entering politics in the first place - as an exterminator, he wanted to put an end to the regulations that limited his ability to apply deadly toxins to other people's houses.
"No one can say for sure how much that gesture of support for Belgrade against NATO extended the bombing campaign, or how many Serbs and Kosovars were killed or displaced as a result. But the Majority Leader of the House of Representatives, at a time when American airmen were risking their lives in the face of the enemy, chose to help the enemy."
I wonder if Kleiman actually believes this. By his standard, the harm done by the anti-war left and some Democrats to the Iraq war effort and to the Iraqi people themselves is near-incalcuable.
If he doesn't believe it, the cynicism of such partisan sliming is of the worst kind.
I'm betting, Tom, that he's probabnly operating from a mindset that distinguishes between political disagreement and actually being bribed by a foreign government.
---Myca
If he hadn't added the harm part, I would agree.
Randy "Duke" Cunningham commuted to Congress from his fucking yacht, everyone in town knew it, and nobody said a goddamn thing until his fat ass got indicted. Seems to me that the entire system is pretty much broken: from the congress to the political parties to the media.
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