Tom of the Dead

Dead Perp Walking

Well as a tip-of-the-hat to that other, famously bitter and spiteful political exits, it looks like we won't have Tom DeLay to kick around anymore.

Of course, when he finally goes to Fedland, his new, numerically-designated pals may have some aggressively physical plans for him...

In honor of Garrison Keillor and Robert Altman, lets just say it’s been a strange Devil’s Area Code week in self-pitying, self-inflicted Republican burg of Lake Woe-Is-Me.

First Dubya tried to pee Gay Marriage into the jet-engine fan of Iraq, gas prices, Katrina, corruption, etc and wound up with nothing for his trouble but a face full of his own nakedly pandering whiz, washed down by a fire hose of incredulity from virtually every side, including the Moderates.

Second, the millions of rabid crab lice that have, until now, kept their arms linked in solidarity to form the blond bile delivery system known as “Ann Coulter” lost their organizational integrity. Their chief piping-bag of contaminated dog shit blew up in the Right’s hands, prompting Rahm Emmanuel to take to the floor of the House and ask (vid and transcript from C&L):

“I must ask my colleagues on the other side of the aisle: Does Ann Coulter speak for you when she suggests poisoning [..] Supreme Court Justices or slanders the 9/11 windows—widows? If not, speak now. Your silence allows her to be your spokesman. She should apologize to all of us who've lost our fellow citizens [unintelligible]”

Good on you, Rahm.

And third, this from the NYT…

June 9, 2006
DeLay Bids the House a Torrid Goodbye
By CARL HULSE
WASHINGTON, June 8 — Representative Tom DeLay personifies the word "unapologetic."

Leaving Congress on Friday under indictment in Texas and under a cloud in Washington for his relationships with a lobbyist and two former senior aides who have pleaded guilty to felony corruption, Mr. DeLay, the combative former Republican majority leader, was not about to distance himself from himself.

"I did a good job," said Mr. DeLay, the linchpin of the House Republican majority for the last decade and the mastermind of a formidable political operation that melded legislating, fund-raising, conservatism and business advocacy as never before. "I helped build the largest political coalition in the last 50 years. The K Street project and the K Street strategy I am very proud of."

Flash: Beelzebubba is “proud” of the work he did to destroy the government, and his knuckle-dragging followers will, no doubt, give him a hero's welcome when he crawls back into that Texas malebolge known as Sugarland.

The article continues...

"He corroded the safeguards of the institution against corruption and put in place a culture where you could trade legislative favors for campaign contributions," said Representative George Miller, Democrat of California. "Hopefully, his passing means the institution may have some chance to recover."

Appropriately enough, Democrats and Republicans bickered one last time on Thursday over Mr. DeLay.

Democrats resisted a Republican plan to allow him to deliver his valedictory from the House floor. But Mr. DeLay crossed them up by submitting his resignation from the Appropriations Committee on the floor, providing an opening for his speech celebrating political discord.

"You show me a nation without partisanship, and I'll show you a tyranny," Mr. DeLay said, adding, "It is not the principled partisan, however obnoxious he may seem to his opponents, who degrades our public debate, but the preening, self-styled statesman who elevates compromise to a first principle."

Flash: Next time your wingnut friends bitch that Liberals are “angry” and the Democrats are only obstructionist, please jam this paragraph up their DeLay holes and break it off sideways. This is the man and the Party that called Liberals traitors for 30 years, and said compromise was a dirty word.

The article continues...

Republicans crowded the chamber and applauded. But many Democrats, who listened at first, exited noisily to show their displeasure, though a few dozen stayed. "Bitter to the bitter end," said Representative Rahm Emanuel, Democrat of Illinois, who heard out Mr. DeLay.

Assessing the strong response he stirs among those who he said have a "deep, deep hate" for him, Mr. DeLay said the opposition never got over being ousted from power back in 1994.

…

"DeLay's legacy is one of turning the relationship between the private sector and the public sector into a pay-to-play environment," said Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the No. 2 Democrat.

Assuming the majority leader's post in 2003, Mr. DeLay gained power and also new scrutiny. He was slapped twice more by the ethics committee in 2004 for his fund-raising tactics and for pressuring a colleague. Then, as Mr. Abramoff became the focus of a federal corruption investigation, Mr. DeLay was indicted in September 2005 in state court in Texas on charges of violating campaign-finance laws.

...
Once he was out of the leadership, he said, he came to the conclusion that he could best pursue his conservative causes outside Congress, unshackled from the rules and restraints of public office. His plans seem unformed but will include speaking, traveling and tormenting Democrats.

"I would imagine that I would be their worst nightmare," he said.

Tom DeLay was never my worst nightmare. He’d have to stand in line a very long time to make it into the top 50.

No, what gives me the heebees is the fact that there are ten’s of thousands of drooling, inbred, Persistent Vegitative Republicans who looked at that walleyed ambulatory tumor of a human being year after year after fucking year, smiled their big, waterhead, Jebus-loves-me-this-I-know smiles and said, “Yes. Yes! We Likey Beelzebubba!”

So it was quite the Republican Christopath Trifecta this week, and the message could not have been any clearer if a witch were skywriting it in letters a mile high on a clear, summer morning.

The mighty engine that drive the GOP is not tax cuts, or fiscal responsibility or even any vestigial of pretense that they are interested in “small government”, privacy and individual rights.

All of that is long over and dead.

With the Coulter-Gay Marriage-DeLay triptych, this week vividly demonstrated that the GOP is, at last, fueled by nothing but hate, and is led by men and women who carefully feed the most loathsome of human impulses, and then rig their sails to financially and electorally exploit the hurricane of hatred that they have deliberately incited.

So exit Tom DeLay.

Pursued by bears.