DeLay's days had long been numbered
Departure highlights problems within Republican Party

From WorkingForChange, the Washington Post's EJ Dionne on what DeLay's departure reveals about the GOP overall:

DeLay's fall is not the moment's most striking political event. His departure could be foreseen at least a year ago when he apologized for his “inartful” attacks on the federal judiciary after Terri Schiavo's death. Once DeLay was forced to say he was sorry about anything, you knew his days were numbered. No, the most important development is the collapse of purpose in the Republican Party and the sense of exhaustion at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. Other than the desperate scramble to make something go right in Iraq, our national government seems to have no energy, no coherence and no sense of direction.

This was brought home to me recently by a very smart Republican consultant whom I had queried about the splits in his party over immigration. He said something surprising: that however divided Republicans were over how to deal with illegal immigrants and border security, at least they were trying to solve a problem. His point was that there aren't many other solutions being proffered in Washington these days by either side.

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In the way that Tom DeLay's fall from grace was written on the wall long ago, the general disarray of the GOP has been inevitable for a quarter century. That is, inherent in their strengths are some major weaknesses. For one, the GOP is strong because they tend to favor big business, from which they get the bulk of their campaign funding, but crafting society to benefit the captains of capital means that everything else is going to deteriorate through neglect--it's taken decades, but it's finally becoming clear that a rising tide does not lift all the boats, and years of policy directed by such a foolish philosophy has left the federal government's ability to promote the general welfare greatly lacking. For another, the grand coalition cobbled together to elect Ronald Reagan, the fundementalists, the neo-liberals, the racists and xenophobes, libertarians and others, simply don't agree with each other on numerous vital issues. Capitalsts, for instance, love to saturate the nation with sexual imagery because it so successfully sells all kinds of products, but fundementalists hate it with great passion. For yet another, the "government is the problem" meme, which so well tapped into America's pseudo sense of anti-authoritarianism, and helped to define a clear cut Republican vison for governance, is, when taken to its ultimate end, obviously an awful approach to actually running the government. Now that the GOP runs everything, and there is pretty much no real liberal political resistance to conservatism, all these problems embedded in what have been perceived as Republican strengths are becoming manifest. That is, the chickens are coming home to roost.

But this is not simply a Republican problem; it's an American problem. And I don't mean that everything would be peachy if the Democrats were in power: when I say that there is no real liberal political resistance, I mean it. I don't think the Democrats could run the country much better; if the Republicans are destroying American quickly, the Democrats would do so slowly, more cautiously, too cowed by decades of conservative propaganda to really do anything drastically different. Either way the country is destroyed. The bottom line is that it now appears that the political system we currently have is inadequate for good government. America is clearly broken and possible solutions on the horizon appear to be inadequate for making things much better. Republicans can't save us because they don't see the problems as problems. Democrats can't save us because they're morons. I don't think our founding fathers ever envisioned a situation where our leaders were so paralyzed by their own political philosophies that they couldn't actually do their jobs. Everything in the Constitution is about balance and compromise; there is no wisdom about being in thrall to campaign donors and mass media blasted sloganeering mixed with slander. But here we are.

I'm really beginning to think we're approaching the end of everything.

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