[Mb-civic] MUST READ: Immoral Majority - Eugene Robinson - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

Immoral Majority

By Eugene Robinson
Friday, September 30, 2005; Page A19

What's the difference between the Republican Party then and the 
Republican Party now ? Here's an illustration: Richard Nixon was the 
president who established the Environmental Protection Agency. Tom "The 
Hammer" DeLay is the congressman who called the EPA a latter-day "Gestapo."

So pardon me for going way beyond schadenfreude to outright giddiness at 
the prospect that the Hammer will finally get nailed.

It may be too much to hope that the former House majority leader -- and 
how good it feels to write "former" -- will actually be convicted and do 
jail time. The indictment for criminal conspiracy returned by a Texas 
grand jury on Wednesday is for alleged campaign finance violations that 
are the rough equivalent of money laundering, which is not the easiest 
crime to prove in court.

But DeLay's problems are bigger than Texas. His golf-buddy relationship 
with Jack Abramoff, a fat-cat lobbyist under federal indictment, will 
face months of scrutiny. DeLay's resignation from the House leadership 
is supposed to be temporary, but Republicans ignored his wishes and 
picked a strong successor who could serve out the rest of this Congress 
if necessary. Clearly they believe their former leader will be 
distracted for some time.

Which makes me feel like it's morning again in America.

DeLay, because he's such a ruthlessly effective bully, has been as 
responsible as anyone for pushing his party to the end of the political 
spectrum previously reserved for the anti-everything, loony-bin far 
right. His comeuppance is an occasion to remind ourselves just what a 
long, strange trip it's been.

There was a time when the conservative movement in this country was the 
preserve of principled eccentrics such as Barry Goldwater. These days 
Goldwater would be thought of as a libertarian more than anything else, 
a firm believer that what people really needed was a good leaving-alone. 
In his prime, he occupied fringe territory that was light-years from the 
mainstream.

Ronald Reagan changed everything, shifting the nation's center of 
gravity to the right. In retrospect, whatever you thought of Reagan's 
policies -- and I didn't like them -- the man at least had a certain 
generosity of spirit. His idea of the black experience in America may 
have been Sammy Davis Jr.'s career, his views of women may have been 
antediluvian and his impression of gay people may have come exclusively 
from dining with Nancy's friends, but at least he had some experience of 
people unlike himself and an appreciation of their humanity.

The crowd now in control of Washington, thanks in part to DeLay's 
undeniable skills, could best be described as Reagan's illegitimate heirs.

Theirs is a greedy, small-minded conservatism. In their policies, they 
seek not to improve government, and certainly not to shrink it, but to 
ruin it -- to starve the regulatory agencies with tax cuts, then spend 
so wildly on pork that there's nothing left to pay for actual government 
work such as, say, preparing for a hurricane.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/29/AR2005092902435.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20050930/4f2f0c48/attachment.htm