Delay 0

There has been a lot of activity about the Tom Delay indictments in the blogosphere. I don’t frequent the nationally known “liberal” blogs all that much, but, even in the local blogs, one sees comments such as this from Daily Sally:

And this, from Citizen Mom:

DeLay indicted.

Bill Frist is peeing his pants right now.

Or this one, from Pandagon:

You probably know that Tom DeLay has been indicted, and is stepping down as House Majority Leader. I’ll bet you didn’t know that the important part isn’t whether or not he did, but how aggressive his defense of his crimes is.

“I may be guilty as sin, but my self-defense is a blessing!”

If you visit more–how shall I put it?–combative blogs, you will find more exuberant comments.

Now, I’m not a big fan of the current Federal Administration. I find it to be in the tradition of the Republican Party–the party of Grant, Harding, and Hoover: inadvertent, venal, and incompetent.

But they have a vision. It is a vision of making the rich richer and the poor poorer; of instituting theocracy and peering into private lives; of sacrificing civil liberties to state power; of, more than anything else, consolidating the power of their Party. And to that end they are willing to sacrifice everything else, including truth, justice, and the American way.

Truth: what about those WMDs. Never were there, and evidence that they were not was systematically and intentionally ignored. Just in this Delay thing, the Republican Party is trying to paint the Texas prosecutor as a relentless partison. Yeah, right. A relentless partisan who has prosecuted three times as many Democrats as Republicans for corruption.

Justice: Willing to lock up anyone, including American citizens (however repugnant those American citizens may be), upon the word of a single man, with no evidence and no due process. There is a historical precedent for this. The Star Chamber–and it was one of the reasons the Founders fought the Revolutionary War to separate from England.

The American Way: I won’t go into detail. I suggest you go here, then think about what is going on today.

But I caution those who exult about the current travails of the Federal Administration. The loyal opposition (and it is, indeed, loyal, despite the attempts of at least some members of the Republican Party to mutate opposition of specific policies into opposition to the Nation) has no vision. It is reactive. It knows what it doesn’t want, but either does not know or cannot articulate what it does want.

Until the Loyal Opposition can articulate a vision of what should be, rather than rail against what should not be, there is little likelihood that the current reign of venality and corruption will be halted.