Former Top WashPost Editor "Giddy" At DeLay Scandal: "Morning Again in America"

Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson is described on the Post syndicate's web page as a long-time "objective" journalist. "In a 25-year career at The Washington Post, Robinson has been city hall reporter, city editor, foreign correspondent in Buenos Aires and London, foreign editor, and assistant managing editor in charge of the paper’s award-winning Style section." That last job was a pretty powerful one.

But a look at today's column on Tom DeLay shows the hard-charging liberal attitude that lurked beneath the "objective" veneer. He expressed "giddiness" at the Ronnie Earle indictment and expressed glee that DeLay is the "former" majority leader, since he represents the "anti-everything, loony-bin far right":

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."

So pardon me for going way beyond schadenfreude to outright giddiness at the prospect that the Hammer will finally get nailed.

It may be too much to hope that the former House majority leader -- and how good it feels to write "former" -- will actually be convicted and do jail time....Clearly they believe their former leader will be distracted for some time. Which makes me feel like it's morning again in America.

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.

But if Robinson is really giddy at the prospect of conservatism leaving the House leadership, does he think his temporary replacement Mel Blunt is somehow the second coming of Jim Jeffords? No, but see how much Robinson hates the current conservative majority. Wow:

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.