WILL DELAY'S POLITICAL DEMISE SAVE THE GOP FROM DROWNING IN ITS OWN CULTURE OF CORRUPTION? NO WAY!

Looking at the clueless corporate media's coverage of DeLay's putative departure from electoral politics astounded me. They really do not get it. They don't grasp that the DeLay-Bush Republican Party is a party of Weakness, a party of Greed, a party of Racism, a party of Corruption. They seem to think-- or they are buying what they've been told or programmed to believe-- that because DeLay is gone, the whole Republican Culture of Corruption is no longer a big story. They're so wrong!

I found this at The RAW STORY today; it comes from THE HILL: “In the long run this is great news because the ‘Tom DeLay problem’ goes away,” said a House Republican leadership aide. “If he has further legal problems it will be on page A8 instead of A1 because he’s no longer a Member of Congress.”

Is that so? Page A8 when DeLay is indicted again... and again... and again? The trial will be on Page A8? The sentencing? And will it be Page A8 when Bob Ney (R-OH) is dragged away screaming about his innocence? And when half the Republican caucus from California-- or at least John Doolittle, Richard Pombo, Jerry Lewis and Duncan Hunter-- are all doin' the perp-walk and getting fingerprinted for taking massive bribes from people with sweatheart government contracts? Will it be Page A8 in Florida when Katherine Harris-- presuming she's not already in a mental institution-- is served with her court papers pertaining to the bribes she accepted from Brent Wilkes? Is that how Virginia media will cover it when the same happens to Virgil Goode, Jr?

I don't think so. The Republican Culture of Corruption is not about one or two or three or a dozen bad apples. It is about a rotten political system, a rotten political party, an ideology mired in no-holds-barred avarice, and it is about a systemic looting of civil society by self-congratulatory, triumphalist predators-- weak men and women who are drunk on the illusion of power and driven mad by the illusion that taking responsibility is for the poor and the weak not for rich, important people like them.

Cunningham is in prison. Abramoff has already plead guilty, as have Kidan and Scanlon and some of DeLay's closest cronies and staffers. These people are singing to federal and state prosecutors in the hopes of getting lighter sentences. As are Wilkes and Wade and Thomas Noe in Ohio. What about Thomas "Gus" Kontogannis? There are rumors that when his testimony comes out there will be a dozen less Republican solons in Washington. No, the Republican Culture of Corruption going away is wishful thinking on the part of Republicans and their allies-- unwitting and otherwise-- in the mass media.

Just look who leads the Republican Party in the House of Representatives! When DeLay's #2-- Whip Roy Blunt-- proven too dripping with Abramoff and K Street excrement even for a (slight) majority of Republican congressloons, who did they elect to take DeLay's place as Majority Leader? John Boehner, a man best known Outside-the-Beltway for handing our bribe checks on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives from big tobacco companies while cigarette legislation was being voted on! And although superficially-avuncular Denny Hastert was just a front man for DeLay's crime operations, he is, after all, the Republican Speaker of the House-- as well as someone under FBI scrunity for accepting bribes from Turkey in return for derailing legislation sought by Armenian-Americans.

Enron, Halliburton, defense contactors, child molesters, K Street, insider trading, casinos on Indian reservations, slave labor in the Marianas, the Ohio Workmen's Compensation Fund, Diebold vote counting... there will be Republican corruption scandals going out as far as the horizen. and maybe someday American corporate media will even look at the billions and billions and billions of dollars that the Bush Regime has stolen as part of their rebuilding Iraq scam-- probably the biggest theft of tax-payer dollars in the history of the country world!