These aren't good people

From this story we find that a few House Republicans supported by that sack of insecticide Tom DeLay killed a bill to institute intelligence reforms that would conform to the 9/11 commision's recommendations.

And of course we have the passage by House Republicans of what Josh Marshall calls the Delay Rule, which would make it so that DeLay can stay in power even if he is indicted for his numerous crimes.

Now, from this MSNBC article via Josh we discover that Senate Republicans had inserted a provision in an omnibus bill that would give some Senate commitee chairmen total access to any American taxpayer's tax return.

What does all of this mean? Well, this isn't news exactly, but it means that congressional Republicans are corrupt, secretive, and unprinicpled. They care more about power than they do about governing, and something has to be done about them.

I'll insert a little side-note. I have a co-worker who clearly doesn't approve of me as a human being, for reasons that are unclear to me. When I was trying to tell my other co-workers that Tom Delay, one of the most corrupt and malignant politicians of the past half century, was being protected from losing power by what I see as a deeply hypocritical act on the part of House Republicans, overturning a rule instituted to punish corrupt Democratic politician Dan Rostenkowski to protect the Bug Man, he told me to shut my face.

We're always talking about how evil the Republicans are, he said. (this is only partly true) Everybody knows about this, blah blah blah.

Actually, most people don't know who DeLay is, let alone that he's one of the most powerful people in DC and that he's being prosecuted for unethical behavior and abuse of power, that many of his Texas cronies have already been indicted. This is real stuff. This man is a true reactionary, a powermonger, and a crook. A decent modern nation like ours can tolerate neither his backwardness nor his corruption.

We are taught, culturally, from an early age, that people who speak ill of folks like Reagan and George W. and Republicans in general are countercultural, a bunch of scraggly hippies and anarchists and drug users with bad hair. In the America where I grew up I knew, and this is in the very blue state of Maryland, mind you, that it was okay to hate the government and to regard politicians with the utmost suspicion right up to the point when these forces of the government expressed hyperbolic Nationalism and chauvinism for all things American and masculine and tough. Conservatism in this country is inexplicably associated with hard-working midwestern family values instead of the moral vacuosness of that lunatic Scaife, that compulsive gambler Bennett, sexual deviants like Bob Packwood and Dick Morris, traitors like Bob Novak, adulterers like Henry Hyde, Bob Livingston, and Newt Gingrich, or gluttonous drug addicts like Rush.

The Republicans and conservatives worked a four decade campaign to be associated with mom and apple pie. It barely slowed them down that many were trapped in that vortex of corruption, Watergate. Or Iran Contra.

A lot of the professional moderates of the chattering class may not like it, and perhaps my co-worker may not either, but these people have to be destroyed, and to destroy them will require a campaign of vilification that will make the Arkansas Project look like an 8th grade campaign for class president.

I applaud what Oliver Willis and others are doing to build Brand Democrat, but something must be done with Brand Republican as well. These people are not reasonable or decent, and America needs to know that.