The enigma of departure

This morning has bought us many official encomiums to the departing Tom DeLay. Here are some of the best. House Majority Whip Roy Blunt has released the following statement which oozes:

“Tom and Christine's commitment to faith, family, smaller government, and national security is unshakable”

The key phrase here is smaller government. That’s the kind of statement that just takes the breath from your lungs and leaves you stunned. I just don’t know how to comment on it unless we can define smaller as larger and faith as corruption. What definition can we give to the growing chaos, hostility and nuclear proliferation that would make it sound like security? I just don’t know.

“His leadership helped take our Republican conference and, as a result, our nation in a new direction” said U.S. Rep. John Boehner. The Captain of the Titanic also took his ship in a new direction and certainly was a strong leader if you define strong as oblivious to reality and driven by ego.

"The House Republican Conference is losing a powerful conservative voice in Tom DeLay.” said National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) Chairman Tom Reynolds. “We celebrate him for time and again delivering on our party's bold agenda of reform.”

I really don’t know how to look at criminal and unethical behavior as a bold agenda of reform or for that matter, how to define bold reform as a conservative rather than progressive goal, but in newspeak the objective is to hide and distort and not to communicate. The Republicans are here to bury DeLay, not to praise him. The fusillades of fulsome praise are there to distract from the fact that Delay is being jettisoned in an attempt to save their troubled ship; steered by pirates, laden to the gunwales with debt, steaming into a hurricane and taking on water.