This weeks issue of Rolling Stone has not only a very good piece by historian Sean Wilentz asking if George W. Bush might just be the worst President in history (along with a front cover caricature of Bush sitting in a corner wearing a dunce’s cap), but also a great don’t-let-the-door-hit-you-on-the-ass piece to Tom DeLay by Matt Taibbi. A good, funny, straight to the point read:

THANK YOU, TOM DELAY
You were the Hammer- the most brutal and feared of all Republican leaders- but only your rank incompetence saved us from your revolution.

The halls of congress already feel different. Under the old House majority leader, the Rayburn Building had the Kubrickian feel of the Full Metal Jacket barracks – heels audibly clicking, something evil hissing in the background. Now it just feels like a building.

I ran into a Democratic staffer friend. “Admit it,” I said. “You’re going to miss Tom DeLay.”
He frowned at me. “Taibbi, you ever have a hemorrhoid?”
I shrugged. “Sure,” I said.
“You miss it?” he asked, then walked away not waiting for my answer.

There are some people out there who think that Tom DeLay is too easy a target, that it’s cheap to hit him now, while he’s down. It makes sense on the surface. DeLay is a short guy with a paunch and an ass-crack face who spent most of his pre-congressional life cutting rat bait and growing the state of Texas’ silliest set of sideburns. He was ugly outside and in: His religious conversion came while watching a video-taped James Dobson sermon, which means that the most important moment of his spiritual life occurred as he sat in front of a television. In a hilarious example of petty capitalist parasitism, he bought his pest control company, Albo, in order to feed off the dubious largess of the Alpo dog food company. Like our current president, he’s an ex-drunk (he claims he used to suck down twelve martinis a night) given to preposterous rhetorical excesses (he once compared the Audubon Society to the Klan), making him a sort of cartoon version of a shameless, pig-hearted right-wing hypocrite.

He was, moreover, all of these things, always, without ever for a second exhibiting any countermanding positive qualities. Tom DeLay was never handsome, never eloquent, never profound, never engaging and certainly never funny. Chicks did not dig DeLay. There is no secondary career as an adored, turtlenecked, coed-ogling poli-sci professor awaiting him. No bar back home full of tough guys is waiting to serve him up a congratulatory cold one, nobody at NASA will name the next comet after him, and he will not be a candidate for the next commissioner of the NFL. The only people left to honor his name will be a bunch of dingbat Christian dispensationalists with big ears and skyblue suits eager to reward him for his undeniable role in speeding humanity toward the Apocalypse.

No, without his hands on the levers of power, DeLay is a total zero, a loser, 200-odd pounds of the world’s purest pussy repellent, and with his resignation, many out there will be tempted to revel in that fact without considering the larger picture.

And the larger picture is this: Tom DeLay was the Stalin of the Republican revolution. The difference is we caught him in time.

The right-wing revolution started out as all revolutions start out: as a piece of upper-class political theater that used the unwashed masses as a stage prop, a pair of crossed pistols on the wall. It was always absurd, this idea of a savage campaign against “elites” being led by a poofy wordsmith like Rush Limbaugh, a Harvard fatty like Grover Norquist, a dickless academic like Newt Gingrich, and a diaper-dumping oligarch like George W. Bush. They were just another band of mischievous aristocrats who played at being the voice of the common man – these new wingers sold themselves as the champions of the fucked-over little guy, in this case the terminally frustrated boobus Americanus, who for decades had been made to sit idly by while ethnics stole his job, evil liberals mocked his religion and his simple way of life, and media “elitists” shut out his views and sent porn and married queers into his living room via the television set.

What made Tom DeLay different is that Tom DeLay was a little guy. He had more in common with Bill Clinton (whom not surprisingly he despised, probably precisely for this reason) than with Gingrich or Norquist or Bush: He came from the dirt of the South, with a drunken reprobate for a father and nothing but white trash in his family tree. Unlike Clinton, however, DeLay was not blessed with personal gifts – looks, brains, charm. Instead of Oxford and Yale, DeLay dropped out of Baylor after being inveigled in a childish campus-vandalism scandal. His pre-politics career as a rat and bug killer was marked by a continual failure that has to be considered shocking in a state so teeming with vermin: An exterminator failing in southeast Texas is like a pimp failing in Bangkok during tourist season.

Gingrich and Limbaugh only played at being an American loser; Tom Delay atually was one. In his first big move as congressman, when he took on the sinful National Endowment for Arts, Delay said, “I don’t know of one dollar in this whole budget that feeds anybody or clothes anybody or helps anybody, other than a bunch of rich people in Houston.” That would be absurd coming from a Norquist or a Bush, but DeLay really meant it.

In the Russian Revolution, Stalin was the penniless, crude, tongue-tied seminary dropout kept in the movement as a hanger-on by brilliant, swashbuckling oraors and theorists like Trotsky, Lenin and Bukharin, who all cynically pretended at fellowship with their darkish brute ethnic comrade. Stalin knew better, and by the time he solidified his grip on power, it was those same handsome intellectuals who ended up crawling on the floors of Moscow garages with bullets in their livers. The famously vengeful Delay was on the way to remaking his party in the same way, disdaining charismatic talkers like Gingrich and Bob Livingston and replacing their type in the apparatus of Washington – not only in Congress, but in the lobbies and the think tanks, who were often forced to comply with his litmus-test hiring preferences – with his faceless, dependable, snake-mean Christian cronies.

What was terrifying about DeLay was that he was the barking voice of that afternoon talk-radio caller given full reign of Washington. He was that same angry lout, not invoked and used by clever academics and con men, but actually in charge: a narrow, selfish, envious, mean-spirited prick who had the whole capital on its knees. What kind of man was he? He only went into national politics in the first place because the federal government had banned a potentially carcinogenic pesticide called Mirex that DeLay had used to kill ants. That was his idea of injustice. He invoked God and counseled a business owner in Saipan to “resist evil,” when the “evil” was a set of worker protections designed to prevent atrocities like forced abortions. He nearly overthrew the government over a blow job. And for all that, DeLay now exits politics with surely only one regret: that he was once described as a “moderate” by The Washington Times.
No, I guess I’m not going to miss Tom DeLay either.

MATT TAIBBI
28 ROLLING STONE, MAY 4,2006