"Harry.Krause" wrote in message
...
King of Crooks

April 15, 2005
By A. P. Short



Tom DeLay is not a likeable man.


Which is all that matters in politics today.

krause

you are an idiot.

No wonder your kids left you, you're on your 3rd wife, your mother moved 600
miles away from you to stuff herself into a home. krause,, no wonder also
you lost your father's business.

krause ,,, no wonder you carry 2 union cards,,, lol,,, what an idiot
krause,,






"Harry.Krause" wrote in message
...
King of Crooks

April 15, 2005
By A. P. Short

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like
whitewashed tombs, which on the outside look beautiful, but inside they
are full of the bones of the dead and of all kinds of filth.

—Jesus the Nazarene, Matthew 23:27

Tom DeLay is not a likeable man. Some part of him has always known this,
it seems, and has avoided the spotlight the way a cockroach or a beetle
will, less out of a conscious sense of self preservation than because to
operate in shadows and dark places is part of the creature's fundamental
nature.

For twenty years, DeLay's penchant for ducking the limelight allowed him
to coexist harmoniously with a Republican Party that was trying with all
its considerable might, despite an increasingly draconian and heartless
pro-corporate legislative agenda, to recast itself as the party of the
common people.

When Newt Gingrich took over the House in 1994, DeLay was elected majority
whip, the position for which he had been born and bred. Infamous for his
tough tactics, many of them in ethical and legal gray areas, and renowned
for his ability to convince unheard-of numbers of representatives to
change their votes at the last minute to ensure passage of critical
legislation, DeLay filled the post with ease and style. He was a success
because he did things his way, but also because his way was exactly the
way the party wanted it done.

DeLay was an invaluable Republican field general during the party's
ten-year dominance of the U.S. House of Representatives, a streak that
will continue at least until the 110th Congress is seated in January of
2007. He raised more money, twisted more arms, and destroyed more enemies
of the Republican machine than anyone in his era, perhaps rivaling even
all-time great fixers like Tex Colson, Richard Nixon, or Joe McCarthy.

Unfortunately for the GOP, the easy symbiosis between the seemingly
respectable upper-class family and the crazy aunt in the attic could not
last forever. Newt Gingrich was brought down by a wave of scandals, and
Trent Lott, Gingrich's successor, met with his own ignominious end after
publicly lamenting – in 2002 - the failure of Strom Thurmond's 1948
"Segregation Forever" presidential campaign.

Suddenly the Republicans found themselves in the position they had been
avoiding for the better part of two decades – Tom DeLay was next in line
for House Majority Leader. No longer could DeLay get by without ever
speaking on the record, without stepping in front of television cameras to
let the country get a very good look at the man who controlled, for
practical purposes, the legislative agenda of the United States of
America.

The fear, of course, was that Juanita Q. Public, like most people who get
to know Tom DeLay, would not like what she saw. So the Republicans did
their level best to ensure that Americans saw a little of DeLay as
possible, and for the most part they were successful. By the end of 2004,
DeLay was still bringing up the rear in polls gauging the public's
knowledge of prominent political personalities – very few people outside
of Texas had any idea who Tom DeLay was.

The Majority Leader's comfortable anonymity could not last forever. During
the 2002 election campaign, DeLay pushed his already outrageous
fundraising tactics to new heights, threatening donors with retribution if
they gave to (or hired) Democrats and funneling vast sums of corporate
cash into the coffers of Texas state Congressional campaigns. In doing so
DeLay ran afoul of Texas law, and Democratic Attorney General Ronnie Earle
wasted no time in busting up DeLay's racket.

By the beginning of 2005, several of DeLay's top aides were facing
indictment on serious corruption charges, and speculation was mounting
that DeLay himself could soon be charged with a felony. This development
presented numerous complications, not least of which was the House ethics
rule that a sitting Majority Leader who is indicted for a crime cannot
continue in his leadership post. The Republicans, apparently not yet
understanding how completely the lid had come off the hamper containing
Tom DeLay's dirty laundry, moved to shield him from disciplinary action by
changing the rules of the House to allow a member to continue on as
Majority Leader despite being under indictment.

House leadership also retaliated against the Republican members of the
House Ethics Committee who had agreed with their Democratic counterparts
that DeLay's illegal fundraising was worthy of an official rebuke,
replacing the wayward Republicans with DeLay loyalists. Then the House
rules were changed once again, this time to make it essentially impossible
for the ethics committee to conduct an investigation into a House member's
ethical lapses (the sole reason for the committee's existence.)

Then in March, Tom DeLay made a rare political misstep that seems likely
to cost him his leadership post, and perhaps even his Congressional seat.
Seeing what looked to him like a golden opportunity to get some positive
face-time with the American public, DeLay plunged himself headlong into
the Terry Schiavo case, railing publicly against the "liberal judges" who
had heartlessly allowed the woman's wishes to be carried out and the law
to be followed.

The result was disaster. Even among the devout, the issue was a
non-starter, and tiny percentages of the American population agreed with
the Republicans' decision to intervene at the eleventh hour. To make
matters worse, DeLay pontificated openly in public about why conservatives
should be happy that God sent Terry Schiavo to save him from the Democrats
and their evil liberal media empire. Mel Martinez circulated a memo
drafted by a former DeLay associate that crowed about the wonderful
(imaginary) political benefits that would accrue to the Republican party
as a result of their meddling in the private affairs of a grieving
American family. It was not the GOP's best moment.

By early April, stories of DeLay's shady dealings with corporate lobbyists
and foreign companies were breaking almost daily, and public satisfaction
with the Republicans in Congress was sinking fast. Slowly, it began to
dawn on movement conservatives that it might be better to cut DeLay loose
than to allow him to take the entire party down with him.

In recent weeks even extremely DeLay-friendly news outlets have gone
rather wobbly. The National Review is hedging its bets with lukewarm,
easily reversible defenses, while the Weekly Standard seems to have
adopted an editorial policy of "Tom De-Who," avoiding any mention of the
embattled Republican leader. The Wall Street Journal tossed DeLay to the
wolves outright last week, and even the ferociously pro-DeLay Bill
O'Reilly has subtly shifted his daily spin from "witch hunt" toward
"innocent until proven guilty."

At the roots level, rank-and-file Republican bloggers are aghast that the
party leadership would even consider putting its 2006 fortunes on the line
for the sake of such a clearly corrupt and illegitimate leader. The pieces
are all in place for DeLay to be hustled out of town quietly in the middle
of the night like the Baltimore Colts. Dennis Hastert and Bill Frist will
toss one more bad apple on the trash heap, and the GOP juggernaut will
roll on, battered but unbowed.

Well, not so fast. Let the record show that it was not until DeLay became
unpopular that House Republicans even discontinued their Herculean efforts
to cover up his crimes, much less discovered the conscience they must have
thought they left in their other pants.

Commentators across the land, many of them Republicans, have taken to
calling Tom DeLay a "hypocrite," presumably because the
legislator-for-sale is also conspicuously Christian. But Tom DeLay is no
hypocrite. He is what he is, and he has never made any great attempt to
hide it from his colleagues. This, after all, is the man who said, when
asked why there shouldn't be at least some limits on corporate financing
of election campaigns "Money is not the root of all evil in politics.
Money is the lifeblood of politics."

Tom DeLay has never pretended to be anything other than a nakedly partisan
political animal who will do absolutely anything to win. It's the rest of
the Republican party whose hypocrisy is on display. The GOP, with all
high-minded talk of civic duty and its flimsy talk show patriotism, is
being exposed for what it is - the refuge of crooks, thieves and con men,
with Tom DeLay their beloved but disgraced King.

Perhaps Tom DeLay is the most corrupt Republican in government. Even so,
it is the coverup and not the crime which has brought low most prominent
Republican criminals in our history, and on that score the entire party is
implicated. Dennis Hastert engineered the shakeup of the ethics committee,
and presided over the rule changes designed to keep DeLay in the House no
matter what his crimes. Rick Santorum may be willing to call DeLay to
account in April, but back in February he said nothing while the
Republican leadership was purging the ethics committee to protect the
Hammer.

Indeed, back before DeLay became toxic, but long after it became common
knowledge that his money was raised through some very creative channels,
prominent Republicans had no qualms about feeding at DeLay's ample trough.
Eric Cantor, John Cornyn, John Thune, Lindsey Graham, Bob Ney, John
Sununu, Norm Coleman, Bob Ehrlich, Chris Chocola, and Saxby Chambliss all
took money from DeLay, and the list goes on and on. The list, in fact, is
so long that it would literally be quicker to simply list the Republican
congresspeople who have NOT financed their campaigns partially from Tom
DeLay's tainted largesse.

But to focus on DeLay's overt corruption, his criminal activity, is
actually to miss the real importance of his tenure as House Majority
Leader, and just what it has done to the political climate in this
country. For it is not DeLay's penchant for rewarding his donors with
corporate pork or showering his immediate family with bogus "salaries"
from his campaign coffers that has turned our legislative process into a
farcical, undemocratic free-for-all.

In his lust for absolute power, Tom DeLay has fundamentally changed the
way the American legislature is run - trampling on the rights of the
minority and of the public the Congress is supposed to serve, and making a
mockery of the values set forth in the U.S. Constitution. DeLay has for
years longed for a system where the checks and balances that the founders
set forth have been dismantled in favor of unfettered one-party rule,
bought and paid for with endless rivers of corporate money.

The moves DeLay has made toward this nightmarish ideal have not been made
in secret, but out in the open. And even now, at the moment of DeLay's
disgrace, John Cornyn continues to endorse DeLay's dark vision of
Republican dictatorship by threatening judges who refuse to bow to GOP
pressure to subvert the laws of their states. Bill Frist continues his
push to remove the right to filibuster judicial appointments, paving the
way for the GOP to stack the already conservative federal bench with
hordes of Republican partisans.

No doubt it will not be long, now that Chris Shays has broken the ice and
become the first Republican to call for DeLay to step down, that some
idealistic young GOP rep will stand in front of a microphone and call Tom
DeLay a "cancer on the Republican party." Embodied in that statement will
be a lie much greater than any that DeLay or his ample right-wing spin
machine ever produced.

Tom DeLay IS the Republican party. He represents everything the party has
stood for going back to the time of Ronald Reagan - hatred, hypocrisy, and
endless, endless greed. The GOP may succeed in cutting Tom DeLay out like
a tumor, but the cancer that threatens to choke our democracy will
continue to grow.

In the next few months, as DeLay continues to circle the drain and is
eventually pulled to his doom, we will learn very little about the man
that we do not already know. He will lash out in desperation as the end
draws near; he will expose his fundamental meanness and lack of human
compassion as he personally attacks the people he once called his friends.

It is the rest of our congresspeople, both Republican and Democratic
alike, who will show us their true colors in the final days of DeLay's
tenure as House Majority Leader. Those who have not succumbed to the ethic
that DeLay embodies - power and money at all costs, and the American
people be damned - will step forward and call for a return to government
by the people, not by K Street lobbyists and slick PR executives in two
hundred dollar ties.

We will know the rest of them, the tainted ones, by the careful way in
which they present the Tom DeLay problem as a problem with the man, and
not one that infected the institution itself. Those who continue to profit
from the atmosphere that Tom DeLay brought to the U.S. Congress may pile
on DeLay as his carcass begins to bloat, but they will not have the
courage to ask, not what Tom DeLay was, but HOW he came to rise to a
position of such great power, and WHY it took so long for him to be
exposed.

If these corrupt elements, and they exist in both parties, are allowed to
get away with pretending that Tom DeLay was the problem, another Tom DeLay
will simply rise to take his place. Americans will continue to lose faith
in their leaders' commitment to representing them, and we will fall
further toward the disintegration of the democratic experiment we all
claim to love.

The King of Crooks is sick and dying, but his court lives on. Are we
rabble content with our small victory, or shall we storm the keep as well?