Party of responsibility? Not so much.

Tom DeLay is leaving, but not so fast that the door won't hit him in the ass.

And of course nothing that has befallen him is his fault. He trusted staffers who turned out to be corrupt and steered him wrong. And anyway, the prosecutor who indicted him is motivated solely by partisanship-- despite that he's a registered Republican and has indicted a dozen Democratic officeholders back in the day.

This is typical of how Republicans acknowledge responsibility: to a man, they don't. Soldiers are dying in Iraq because of a few dead-enders and/or foreign insurgents. The exact same torture techniques were practiced in Abu Ghraib, Bagram, Gitmo, and wherever else because of a few bad apples. Hijacked planes struck the twin towers because Richard Clarke hates America. George Bush's approval ratings are circling the drain because Michael Moore is fat. And everything is undermined by those mean old Democrats, notwithstanding that in present-day Washington they have all the real power of a caucus of churchmice.

More truly than he ever dreamed, George W. Bush is our CEO president-- because a corporation is a legal construct designed specifically to dodge responsibility; that's why they call it "limited liability corporation." It allows top management to take all the credit for the good news-- sales are up! profits are skyrocketing!-- and evade the blame for all the corners that had to be cut, promises that had to be broken, stakeholders that had to be cheated, to achieve those wonderful bottom line numbers.

But even CEO's of bankrupt companies can't get away with the whining and excuse-making that the Bushies do. It goes beyond spin, beyond PR, well beyond the bounds of reasonable adult behavior. It's a pattern that if you found your kid doing it, you'd send him to bed without supper. It's the pathology of alcoholism.

Why does the country put up with it? Is it our admiration for a successful con-man? Or do we *identify* with such craven behavior? Are we so manifestly a whole country (at least 51% of us) of slackers? Do we all assume we've achieved our Peter Principle level of incompetence, fudging our way through our days and hoping the authorities we report to buy our own excuses? I've heard it said that the reason tax cuts for the rich is a winning issue is that every American secretly believes he's destined to get rich someday. Maybe we all figure we'll do it in the Bush tradition of failing upward.

I've been obsessing for a while with Matthew 25:40, where Jesus tells the apostles, "If you have done it for the least of my brethren, you have done it for me." We've always known that Jesus wants us to take care of the less fortunate, but only today did I realize that there's a deeper meaning to this text: Jesus knows that typical fallible vainglorious humans left to their own devices will tend to identify with the rich and powerful and glamorous, to take pride in their glories and project our own successes onto theirs. But he wants us to know that not only do we need to be mindful of the poor and small and meek, not only does he judge us by how we deal with them, but he's implicitly telling us *he identifies with them,* not with the mighty of this world, and so should we.