Frank Rich (NYT): Get Tom DeLay to the Church on Time

[Dudley_DUright]

A scandal is like any other melodrama: It can't be a crowd pleaser unless the audience can follow the plot. That's why Monica Lewinsky trumped Whitewater, and that's why of all the story lines ensnaring Tom DeLay, the one with legs is the one with the craps tables. It's not just easy to follow, but it also has a combustive cultural element that makes it as representative of its political era as Monicagate was of the Clinton years. As the lies and subterfuge of the go-go 1990's coalesced around sex, so the scandal of our new "moral values" decade comes cloaked in religion. The hair shirt is the new thong.

This time the plot begins with money. Two K Street fixers, a lobbyist named Jack Abramoff and a flack named Michael Scanlon, managed to snooker six American Indian tribes into handing over $82 million in exchange for furthering their casino interests. According to The Washington Post, some of their tribal takings, cycled through a nonprofit center for "public policy research," helped send Mr. DeLay golfing in Scotland. The pious congressman, a gambling foe, says he had no idea of his trip's sinful provenance. Never mind that Mr. DeLay was joined abroad by Mr. Abramoff, whom he has described as one of his "closest and dearest friends," or that Mr. Scanlon had once been his spokesman. Mr. DeLay was as innocent of the goings-on around him as a piano player in a brothel.

Beltway cronyism, dubious junkets, loophole-laden denials are all, of course, time-honored Washington fare. The few on the right backing away from Mr. DeLay, from The Wall Street Journal's editorial page to Newt Gingrich, make a point of reminding us of that. As they see it, more in sorrow than in anger, the Gingrich revolutionaries who vowed to end the corruption practiced by Congressional Democrats have now been infected by the same Washington virus as their opponents. That's true, but this critique of Mr. DeLay and company by their own camp all too conveniently sidesteps the distinguishing feature of this scandal. Democratic malefactors like Jim Wright and L.B.J.'s old fixer Bobby Baker didn't wear the Bible on their sleeves.

In the DeLay story almost every player has ostentatious religious trappings, starting with the House majority leader himself. His efforts to play God with Terri Schiavo were preceded by crusades like blaming the teaching of evolution for school shootings and raising money for the Traditional Values Coalition's campaign to save America from the "war on Christianity." Mr. DeLay's chief of staff was his pastor, and, according to Time magazine, organized daily prayer sessions in their office. Today this holy man, Ed Buckham, is a lobbyist implicated in another DeLay junket to South Korea.

more...

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/17/opinion/17rich.html?hp

[EFerrari]

1. To the tune of "I'm getting married in the morning"

I'm getting funded in the morning
Ca-ching, the money's coming in!
Don't even worry
About checks cashed in hurry.
Just put it in my pocket,
put it in my pocket
right now.

[Dudley_DUright]

2. LOL!

Now that song will be running around in my head for the rest of the night (albeit with modified lyrics).

[EFerrari]

7. You could do worse than Lerner & Loewe --

It could have been the BeeGees :hi:

[punpirate]

3. Not that the Christian right...

... is going to believe anything in the NY Times, but Rich does a great job of fleshing out these characters--showing their sleaze and not just the side of them that connects the Christian right to Beltway politics, as so many journalists do.

When only the latter is done, I think it tells the Christian right that, well, dammit, they're just hard chargers for the benefit of God, and there's nothing really wrong in that. However, when they also, in the same breath, are connected to the really seamy side of politics, there's a connect-the-dots effect that must make the Christian right rank-and-file want to run away screaming. :)

How deliciously satisfying it is to see DeLay crab-walking away from everything he's done (and incited). I expect the religious persecution argument to surface in full bloom any day now. One can be sure, when it does, that indictments are not very far behind. :)

[prodigal_green]

5. What's interesting is that the Protestant reformation

occurred when Martin Luther, sick of the secular corruption of the Church, finally said "enough." I wonder if anybody from the fundie camp will have the guts to do the same?

[punpirate]

6. My guess is no, they won't...

... if only because the issues in the Reformation were fundamentally (there's that word, again :) ) different. The roots of the Reformation were in the persecution of splinter sects by a state-established religion.

Today, the fundies want a state-supported religion--namely, their brand of Christianity--and have been supporting some of the biggest hacks in the business to that end. They're going to be extremely tolerant of this sort of political excess, even if they're destined to run helter-skelter away from this sort of corruption to protect themselves from being besmirched by it. Have no fear, they'll find another champion for their cause.

The backlash is likely going to originate in the mainstream churches which are now being ostracized by the fundies for not being sufficiently zealous about dominionism. Those churches are loaded with highly conservative people (in the more traditional sense of the word) who consistently voted for conservatives, anyway, but voted for people like DeLay on the basis of his professed faith. They're the ones that are going to see through, eventually, the religious fog machine DeLay's been using to obscure his influence-peddling ways which have been obvious to everyone except those who've let themselves be swayed by his "faith."

In Sugar Land, it's going to be a matter of degree, not kind. The fundies will do everything they can to keep DeLay in business, but the hardcore mainstream Baptists with a highly developed sense of the right and wrong of others will be the ones to vote him out.

Cheers.

[struggle4progress]

9. We don't have to persuade the nutbars: we have to sway ...

... Middle America.

We never persuade our hardcore opponents: we just get normal people to give them nervous sideways looks and edge carefully away when the nutbars appear ...

[acmejack]

4. It must be something in the water.

As my dear old daddy says, "There are a lot more horse's asses than there are horses" which is especially true in Texas.

[Demit]

8. "Beltway creeps". Another great scathing Frank Rich piece

He always gets it right--

"...the religious trappings add a note that distinguishes these Beltway creeps from those who have come before: a supreme righteousness that often spirals into anger and fire-and-brimstone zealotry that can do far more damage to America than ill-begotten golf junkets. ..."