Where by 'hero' I mean, um, something along the lines of 'nanny nanny boo boo':
A Texas grand jury indicted Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) yesterday for alleged involvement in money-laundering related to the 2002 Texas election, raising new and more serious allegations than the conspiracy charge lodged against the former House majority leader last week.
DeLay's corruption and influence-peddling have long been common knowledge (he's the shining star at the center of the Republicans' K Street project), which is what makes conservative pundits' and bloggers' defenses of the man - most of which boil down, ironically enough, to 'this is just dirty politics by that nasty partisan prosecutor' - so astonishing. What's happening there? I suspect it's nothing more interesting than the refusal to believe that they've been taken for a ride. I suspect that a similar phenomenon is at work w/r/t the Iraq war - it's galling for chickenhawks to realize that Official Bad Guy John Kerry and his Dem compatriots were speaking the truth (almost accidentally, at times) when they said Bush couldn't be trusted, wasn't competent, had falsified evidence, et bloody cetera.
The real action will be next year - we'll see whether the Dems can turn the midterm election into an inversion of the Contract With America. Shouldn't be hard to marshall evidence (it never is): as some pundit observed, it took the GOP 10 years to achieve the level of thoroughgoing corruption and special-interest pork-barrel calcification that took the Dems a third of a century or more.
I wonder whether McCain is planning another run - could he do it? Is he fed up enough with his own party to head into the netherworld of Independent candidacy (read: apostasy) that wishy-washy centrists like me hope for? Is there a set of issues more tailor-made for the man than Abu Ghraib, campaign finance corruption, ending the war in Iraq?
