When good news breaks, like the recent DeLay indictment, I love whooping it up like any dKos reader in the virtual confines of a comfortable and agreeable crowd.
But after a few self-satisfied hours of enjoyment, my mind strays.......How are the Republicans taking this? What new outrages against logic are going to be thrown against blog pages to see what sticks?
So I stray from the comfort of the orange glow and see how things are going in other corners of the web. By far my favorite channel into what is going on across the aisle is RedState--because they are a reliable predictor of the Republican talking points, but also because their Scoop format allows some stray points of view to show up from time to time. And sometime these lonely voices actually get it.
Former RS first pager
Josh Trevino (aka Tacitus) recently made a splash in the blog world when he resigned from RS.
This followed quickly on the heels of an article he authored that was sharply critical of Bush's Katrina Performance. We here suspected 'editorial differences' (i.e. he could no longer be trusted to toe the party line), but this was vehemently denied by the split parties at RS.
However, today's trevino diary, Pride Goeth, seems to support the 'lack of line-toeing' presumption.
In it, trevino does what anyone with a firm grip on current events would do: He calls the Republicans out for not dumping DeLay sooner.
Now that the indictment of the erstwhile House Majority Leader is an accomplished fact, the wisdom of chaining the conservative movement to Tom DeLay is apparent even to the most fervent of the true believers. The fall of Tom DeLay is not merely a parable of hubris in one man: it is the tale of ego begetting ill-judgment in the conservative movement at large.
Amen. I imagine quite a few other conservatives (as opposed to republicans...) will wake up with a post-indictment hangover and wonder "what the hell were we thinking?"
The pity is that Republicans who care more about their party than about the cult of personality attendant to its key figures have long warned of this day. We knew all along that Tom DeLay was a bully -- ask the Heritage Foundation about his penchant for petty grudges. We knew all along that he was, on a fundamental level, unprincipled -- ask him about the fat in the Federal budget. We knew all along that he was mostly interested in power for its own sake -- recall, please, that he sought a House rules change to protect his leadership position in this very circumstance. And we knew that if it came to an indictment, it would be the end.
What were they thinking?
But just when you are about to jump up and yell "Halleluiah, Brother!", trevino takes a quick turn back into the cover of partisanship:
What of the charges against him? His antagonist, Ronnie Earle, is a Democratic hack and a dishonest prosecutor. The probability is that Tom DeLay will be acquitted of the single charge against him, and rightly so. On a legal level, he is almost certainly guilty of nothing more than a poor choice of friends.
Come on, trevino. Do you really believe yourself here? What happened to your clarity? Did you miss the news that Earle has prosecuted FAR more Democrats than Republicans in his career? Did you forget that the conspiracy charges are due to the actions of political groups that Tom created? Or Tthat his ties to Jack Abramoff are deep and well chronicled?
John Gotti had bad taste in friends, too, but that didn't make him any less guilty.
And it appears that your party has a tragically strong attraction to the wrong sort of boys.