What's the Delay, you say????

The DeLay Smoke Screen House Republican Leader Tom DeLay, struggling with an ever-widening circle of allegations of ethical lapses and potentially illegal conduct, has clearly settled on a strategy to make himself bullet-proof: just attack anyone who questions his and the Republican Congress' behavior as instruments of a vast left-wing conspiracy to "destroy the conservative movement." Today's Washington Post reports DeLay has enlisted a number of conservative groups to echo this dismissive message, which goes as follows (in DeLay's own words): "It's nothing but a bunch of leftist organizations that have a public strategy to demonize me." Already, some of his allies are circulating talking points that suggest DeLay's ethical problems are just a mirage created by organizations connected to a figure they like to demonize, liberal financier George Soros. So let's examine some of the leftist conspirators who are concerned about DeLay's behavior, and what it says about the GOP-controlled Congress: For starters, there's us. We have long argued that DeLay's modus operandi, focused on a crude play-for-pay approach to lobbyists interested in legislation, and including the most savagely partisan management of the House since the Gilded Age, is a disgrace, even if it turns out he has simply violated Congress' toothless ethics rules rather than any actual criminal statutes. Somehow or other we have reached this conclusion without receiving any advice, instruction, or donations from Mr. Soros, and few of our friends or critics would do anything but laugh at the idea that the DLC is some sort of "leftist" front organization. But even across the aisle in DeLay's own GOP voices are being raised against his style of governance, and against the corruption of the once-proud "Republican Revolution" that lifted him to power. Just the other day, that well-known leftist organ, the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, summarized the allegations against DeLay, and concluded: "Whether Mr. DeLay violated the small print of House Ethics or campaign-finance rules is thus largely beside the point. His real fault lies in betraying the broader set of principles that brought him into office, and which, if he continues as before, sooner or later will sweep him out." Then there's The Weekly Standard magazine, financed not by Mr. Soros, but by Rupert Murdoch, which has reported heavily and scathingly on the Indian Casino Shakedown scandal in which a close DeLay associate is a key figure, and of which DeLay himself, along with other prominent House GOP members, is alleged to have been a beneficiary. And only a true conspiracy-theory enthusiast could believe the "leftist" campaign to "demonize" Tom DeLay could extend to College Station, Texas, where the Texas A&M student newspaper, The Battalion, published an opinion column earlier this week calling on Republicans to oppose DeLay's re-election in 2006. It's not surprising that DeLay is promoting a "we're all in this together" defense, in which fidelity to the conservative cause and the GOP require a hard line against any allegations of wrong-doing. But it's a smokescreen designed to obscure the facts and give DeLay carte blanche to do anything he wants, as a matter of ideological and partisan solidarity. For their part, Democrats need to remember this controversy is not simply about Tom DeLay. The real goal is stopping the pattern of partisan and ethical abuses he represents. As even Republicans are beginning to say, DeLay's real significance is his role in the degeneration of key leaders of the conservative movement into a power-hungry cabal that has avidly pursued the maximum use of government to reward Republican constituency groups, to entrench wealth and privilege at the expense of the national interest, and to perpetuate their power as far into the future as possible. As Republican David Brooks said of the Republican Revolutionaries of 1995 in a New York Times column last week: "As time went by, the spectacular devolution of morals accelerated. Many of the young innovators were behaving like people who, having read Barry Goldwater's 'Conscience of a Conservative,' embraced the conservative part while discarding the conscience part." With each effort to wrap himself in the mantle of ideology and party, Tom DeLay seeks to tie his friends to a systemic culture of political corruption. And you certainly don't have to be a "leftist" to deplore that.