Current News and Commentary on American Theocracy Chapter 6 – Tom DeLay
From yesterday's synopsis:
Phillips writes, “As for the leanings of key GoP leaders much of the attention focused on George W. Bush and Tom DeLay, the Republican House majority leader, who openly aid, “God is using me all the time everywhere, to stand up for a biblical world view in everything that I do and everywhere I am. He is training me.” However, the larger tale lies in data showing that in 2004 all even of the top Republican leaders in the U.S. Senate, starting with Majority Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee and working down to Senator George Allen of Virginia, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, boasted 100 percent ratings from the Christian Coalition, founded by Pat Robertson in the wake of his 1988 presidential bid....Congressman Christopher Shays of Connecticut in late March 2005 sadly declared that “the Republican Party of Lincoln has become a party of theocracy.”
As Scarlett O'Hara said, “Tomorrow is another day.”
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- Associated Press article about the felony conviction of Tom DeLay, written by Juan A. Lozano.
Let's cut to the guts of the felonies successfully prosecuted and the whiny defenses used:
“Prosecutors said DeLay conspired with two associates, John Colyandro and Jim Ellis, to use his Texas-based PAC to send $190,000 in corporate money to an arm of the Washington-based Republican National Committee, or RNC. The RNC then sent the same amount to seven Texas House candidates. Under Texas law, corporate money can't go directly to political campaigns.
“Prosecutors claim the money helped Republicans take control of the Texas House. That enabled the GOP majority to push through a DeLay-engineered congressional redistricting plan that sent more Texas Republicans to Congress in 2004 — and strengthened DeLay's political power.
“DeLay's attorneys argued the money swap resulted in the seven candidates getting donations from individuals, which they could legally use in Texas.
“They also said DeLay only lent his name to the PAC and had little involvement in how it was run. Prosecutors, who presented mostly circumstantial evidence, didn't prove he committed a crime, they said.
“DeLay contended the charges against him were a political vendetta by Ronnie Earle, the former Democratic Travis County district attorney who originally brought the case and is now retired.”
- from the Associated Press, http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_delay_trial
DeLay's chief defense consul was Dick DeGuerin (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_DeGuerin ). I am going to write some things in the balance of this post that may seem cock-sure or arrogant or unbelievable. Please withhold your disbelief and criticism until you have read Blood and Money, a true murder story by the late Tommy Thompson. This book remains widely available. I recommend that you get a hardback copy and read it about once every five years for the remainder of your life. This is a book that rereads well. For our purposes, it is important because it infallibly estabishes that the Houston-to-Galveston area of Texas is a very particular subculture with distinct social and criminal mores of behavior.
Incidentally, the blog author is a native Galvestonian.
How can it be that House Majority Leader Tom DeLay could make these fantastic claims about being close to Jesus at the very time in his life that he was committing Texas state felonies?
“That's very simple.”
Tom DeLay is a double high authoritarian, according to the matrix used by John Dean. He spends his life manipulating and frightening rubes who are stupider than he and know less than he. Church is a temple of social power for Tom DeLay. As a born again Christian, by definition, once you are saved you are immune to hell or punishment as long as you maintain your personal relationship with Jesus.
Immunity on earth through the ceremony of baptism. It doesn't matter if the Bible itself tells you that you aren't worthy:
(Rev. 5:3) And no man in heaven, nor in earth, neither under the earth, was able to open the book, neither to look thereon.
The Old Testament offers us some advice for dealing with royalty, surely applicable to the King of Kings, Jesus himself:
(Proverbs 25:3) The heaven for height, and the earth for depth, and the heart of kings [is] unsearchable.
(Proverbs 25:3 –a modern restatement in the New Living Translation 2007): No one can comprehend the height of heaven, the depth of the earth, or all that goes on in the king's mind!
I have taken these two quotes directly to evangelicals trying to convert me from my stuffy Episcopalian half-faith. I can quote these scriptures verbatim from memory (which impresses them) but they are horrified. “That's a quote out of context!” they shriek.
They get upset, because Jesus has became their buddy. Once saved, always forgiven for any failings that occur after the hysteria of being saved. DeLay defaced college property as a student and was a constant drinker and playboy, which did not keep him from being elected to the Texas state house nor to Congress in 1984. The next year he was born again. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_DeLay )Is it too much to summarize that DeLay exchanged the fun of drink and girls for the social power he thought Jesus was offering him to exercise, to his own advantage, in politics?
How much faith can we place in the American theocracy DeLay would have liked to build? Let me rephrase this question to induce a faster and more lucid response: “Does DeLay preserve quiddity?”
Who are these people and to what lengths will they go to serve their theocratic utopia? That will be discussed in the next blog entry.
doubtless the Christian right will blame a "liberal judiciary" for convicting him. even if they believe he's guilty, the will STILL approve of his actions as being necessary to fulfill the will of God. You cannot win an argument with these people.
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