WILL TOM DELAY TAKE DOWN THE GOP WITH HIM?
The Lizard King's Soft White Underbelly Is Now Exposed

The left wing of the Blogosphere has been abuzz this weekend with speculation about recent events concerning scandal ridden House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. So I've got a couple of links here to keep Real Art readers up to date on what's been going on.

First, on Friday Democrats were quick to fire back at DeLay's veiled threat against the Federal judges who recently decided against Terri Schiavo's parents. From the Houston Chronicle:

Democrat says statements about the Schiavo
case were threats that violated the law

A Democratic U.S. senator from New Jersey suggested Friday that House Majority Leader Tom DeLay broke the law when he assailed federal judges involved in the Terri Schiavo case.

"Threats against specific federal judges are not only a serious crime, but also beneath a member of Congress," Sen. Frank Lautenberg wrote in a letter to DeLay that he shared with the media. "Your attempt to intimidate judges in America not only threatens our courts, but our fundamental democracy as well."

DeLay's office did not return telephone calls seeking comment Friday.

And

Lautenberg and Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., said DeLay's comments were particularly reckless in the aftermath of the recent killing of a Georgia judge and the killing of a federal judge's husband and mother in Chicago.

"Our nation's judges must be concerned for their safety and security when they are asked to make difficult decisions every day. That's why comments like those you made are not only irresponsible, but downright dangerous," Lautenberg wrote in his letter. "You owe them — and all Americans — an apology for your reckless statements."

Click here for the rest.

Nice to see some Democrats with balls these days. But it's not simply Democrats who have DeLay in their sights: he seems to be losing support from his own constituents, in what has been considered a "safe" district for many, many years now. Again from the Houston Chronicle:

DeLay is losing support, poll finds

Yet 49 percent said they would vote for someone other than DeLay if a congressional election in the 22nd District were at hand; 39 percent said they would stick with him.

"There seems to be no question that there has been an erosion in support for the congressman," said John Zogby, whose polling company, Zogby International, performed the survey. "He is posting numbers that one would have to consider in the dangerous territory for an incumbent. And he isn't just an incumbent, he is a longtime incumbent."

And

The poll findings come as the tough-as-nails DeLay slogs through one of the roughest years of his two decades on Capitol Hill.

He was admonished three times by the House ethics committee, questions have been raised about the financial backing for some of his overseas trips, and Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle, a Democrat, is investigating the political fund-raising tactics of a political action committee DeLay helped set up.

And

On the Schiavo issue, DeLay consistently has stated that his constituents backed his decision to lead Congress into the dispute over whether to continue nourishment to the severely brain-damaged Florida woman.

"Everywhere I went (in the district) people were ... very supportive of the efforts to try and save her," DeLay said Wednesday at Sugar Land Regional Airport.

But nearly 69 percent of people in the poll, including substantial majorities of Democrats and Republicans, said they opposed the government's intervention in the longstanding family battle.

Click here for the rest.

So the ethics violations coupled with the investigation of DeLay's fundraising in Austin opened the door, but his leading the charge to meddle in the Schiavo case, which was obviously a ploy to draw focus away from his legal troubles, is what's freaking out his own voters. For the first time ever, the former exterminator from Sugar Land is vulnerable. I say we slit him open like an Aztec sacrifice, myself: here's hoping the do-nothing Democrats pump countless dollars into the election in '06.

But what does this mean in terms of national politics? This is the question that's making internet liberals short of breath. From Hullabaloo courtesy of Eschaton:

"It's a Sicilian message. It means
Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes."

This Tom DeLay mess is really getting interesting, isn't it? While I appreciate the "don't fire 'til you see the whites of their eyes" strategy, after some thought I've decided that it's probably a good idea for the Democrats to put pressure on Delay right now. As a matter of fact, I think it will ensure that the wingnuts continue to support him and that he stays in the news and in his post well into the 2006 election cycle. Nothing will make the radicals more vociferously defend their wounded leader than a bunch of Democrats attacking him. And I think that we want the extreme rightwing to be defending Tom DeLay, especially the Randall Terrys and the James Dobsons, as often as possible.

We especially want to see those guys on Fox News. A lot. And here's why. Something happened during the Schiavo circus, I think, and it was something significant. But it wasn't that the nation saw that politicians were all a bunch of craven opportunists. They already knew that. It was that the Republican professional class, the libertarians and some common sense types saw FOX News and talk radio as being full of shit for the first time. I have nothing but a handful of anecdotes to back that up, but I think Schiavo may turn out to be the first big tear in the right wing matrix.

Click here for the rest.

It just may be that the whole Schiavo thing, engineered by DeLay, is starting to freak out a substantial number of Republicans. Republicans who may be starting to see that everything conservative leaders say isn't true. Indeed, former Republican senator John Danforth wrote an editorial essentially saying that the religious right has hijacked the GOP, and that hijacking is pulling the party away from its traditional values.

This may all just be a bump in the road, and the Republican Party could hold power for decades to come. But there are cracks in the wall, and this could instead be the beginning of the end. I mean, it's amazing that DeLay might lose his own district a year and a half from now, and it's even more amazing that saner Republicans might mount a drive to kick out the fundamentalists. This is unprecedented in my lifetime. I can only hope.

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