Fawning over the fake Partial Birth Abortion “controversy”.

Fawning over Delay’s fake “Christianity”.

Delay loves to spit on Traditional Christianity. You know the kind: where a full day’s work gains you a descent income and real men feed the poor.

Delay loves that New Time Do Nothing Religion. You know the kind: We saw it before. The Pharisees are alive and well.

Sooner or later Americans will wake up to the horrors the GOP has created. When they do, we need to be there to lead America out of its long national nightmare.

I was thinking of the Gucci riot crowd in Miami that helped to thwart the recount in 2000. But I forgot about Tom DeLay's pivotal role. John Nichols remembers (I have now added a phrase with a link to this article to the original blog entry):

Furious that the Florida Supreme Court had on November 21, 2000, ordered a real recount of disputed ballots in the race that would decide the presidency, the House Republican leader had issued a statement that declared: "I hope this misguided ruling will be vigorously challenged."

DeLay was not making an idle threat. He was delivering marching orders to the troops in his war on democracy.

On the following day, a crowd of Republican aides and lobbyists flown in from Washington swarmed into the Goverment Center, chased Democratic observers out of the building and began banging on the doors of the area in which the recount of the key county's ballots had begun. Leading the "rioters" in chants of "Stop the Count" was Tom Pyle, a policy analyst in DeLay's office.

[...]

That pressure was applied by DeLay, who would say after the US Supreme Court locked in the results for Bush: "This is something I've been working on for twenty-two years. I mean, we got it."

For once, DeLay was being modest. While Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris and Antonin Scalia all played their parts, it was DeLay who brought down the hammer that stopped the recount process at its most critical point.

More from Nichols:

DeLay's war on American democracy--which included not just radical gerrymandering of Congressional districts and the formalization of pay-to-play policy-making in Washington but the crude manipulation of the recount that made George Bush President--is now coming to a close.

[...]

Histories of this dark passage in the American story will record that no political figure fought harder or longer to dismantle traditions of compromise and cooperation in Congress than DeLay, a man who targeted those with whom he disagreed as zealously as he had once gone after the vermin he chased in his previous career as an exterminator. As far as DeLay was concerned, the niceties of democracy were a cruel impediment to his new career path. So he went to war with the process itself on behalf of his own political advancement--and that of the paymasters in the industries he served more diligently than his Texas constituents, his conservative ideology or his Republican Party.

While it is surely the case that the Texas Congressman's career was in steep decline following his indictment on campaign-corruption charges and his forced resignation from the majority leader position, for so long as Tom DeLay remained within grasping reach of the levers of power in Washington, the prospect of a further dismantling of democracy remained all too real.

Remember, roll & giggle!

Bye, Tom!

Very funny video, Chip. Thank you for posting it. I'm sure that I'm not the only one here who will enjoy watching it.

"Tom DeLay is Who All of Us Want to Be When We Grow Up"

troops in wearing a uniform. His may will be orange and will have some pretty heavy jewelry attached...but a uniform nevertheless.

Now, if we can just provide all the others in this fascist regime with the same uniform, America can get on with the business of leading the world by example and not by the number of dirty deeds as is presently the case.

A mind once expanded can never return to its original dimensions.

Anne Hathaway: 1556-1623