Morning in America: a bully is indicted

WHAT'S the difference between the Republican Party then and the Republican Party now? Here's an illustration: Richard Nixon was the president who established the Environmental Protection Agency. Tom "the Hammer" DeLay is the congressman who called the EPA a latter-day "Gestapo." <snip>

DeLay, because he's such a ruthlessly effective bully, has been as responsible as anyone for pushing his party to the end of the political spectrum previously reserved for the anti-everything, loony-bin far right. His comeuppance is an occasion to remind ourselves just what a long, strange trip it's been.

There was a time when the conservative movement in this country was the preserve of principled eccentrics such as Barry Goldwater. These days, Goldwater would be thought of as a libertarian more than anything else, a firm believer that what people really needed was a good leaving-alone. In his prime, he occupied fringe territory that was light-years from the mainstream. <snip>

Theirs is a greedy, small-minded conservatism. In their policies, they seek not to improve government and certainly not to shrink it, but to ruin it — to starve the regulatory agencies with tax cuts, then spend so wildly on pork that there's nothing left to pay for actual government work such as, say, preparing for a hurricane. <snip>

http://www.insidebayarea.com/sanmateocountytimes/oped/ci_3074967

armed, they came from within to destroy us. like a nasty infection.