Serving up a fine political rant:
This is the world of the Republican Party, split open like a rotting pumpkin. Crime after crime after crime being investigated, all revolving around the Republican money machine. Every seed connected by the strands of money they share between them. Barely-laundered campaign money passed in the palm of every flabby handshake. Every player in boldface, underlined print in the Rolodex of every other.
Read on here.
What has happened to America in the last decade?
Have we become so jaded that DeLay-style political racketeering becomes acceptable?
Gingrich vaulted himself and ultimately the Republicans into Congressional power over the political bodies of Jim Wright and Dan Rostenkowski. Rostenski's and Wright's sins, playing the angles of ethics laws, were transformed into electoral gold by the Republican Machine.
Now Rostenkowski and Wright seem slightly quaint compared to current GOP sleeze like some colorful political bosses of old, Boss Tweeds of yesteryear.
So why do the scandals of Wright and Rostenkowski have legs but those of DeLay, Frist, Cheney, Enron and Halliburton apparently don't? Why can't the Democrats ride them into power or at least a bigger slice of the House and Senate?
Wright's and Rostenkowski's ill gotten gains went into their own pockets. There is no mitigating circumstance, no fiction to explain it all away as politics as usual.
Yet when vastly greater sums of money slosh between PACs, lobbyists and Republican party leaders supporting a self-sustaining incestuous grip on power that is demonstrably far more injurious to America than personal venality, where's the outrage?
Newt Gingrinch learned a lesson that the Democrats have yet to learn. Fulminating against a rigged political system will only get you so far.
The public has no patience to appreciate how political processes can be turned into political perpetual motion machines. A politician caught taking money from the till and putting it into his own pocket is easy to understand.
So forget the Machine that Tom DeLay has built, or at least don't make it the lead paragraph. If you are going make the argument that the Republican power structure is stinkingly corrupt - as the Democrats must and should - lead with the personal.
Hammer DeLay's family kickbacks. Nail Frist's personal profiteering.
And then talk about how the Republican grip on all three branches of government is debilitating our political life.