Hammer in the evening

Goodbye, Tom Delay, and good riddance.

But if any hopeful news readers think that DeLay's downfall means a cleaner, more honest Republican party, they're just delusional. Tom Delay built this Republican Congress - the lobbyists, the lieutenants, the cronies. Successors are already lining up to be the next King of Corruption.

The plain truth is that at this moment in history, the Republican party happens to be more corrupt than the Democratic party. Why? First of all, because the Republican party is more of an organized machine. Corrupt people are going to be drawn to the more hierarchical, organized party, because it seems like a surefire way to quietly work your way to the top and grab some goodies.

The second reason is because the Democrats are weak, and have been so for the last quarter century. The more lopsided politics is, the more the ruling party gets to...well...party. For a more extreme example, look at Japan, where the same party has held power for 55 years, and is as corrupt as parties can get.

But there's a very special force behind Tom DeLay's particular brand of corruption. That force is the ideology of the "Christian Right," which believes that conservative politics are the truest expression of the Christian faith. Politicians who support and are supported by the Christian Right tend to believe that anything they do is in the service of God - even if those things happen to be illegal, corrupt, and/or unrelated to the Christian religion. Thus, members of the Christian Right see little reason to be honest, fair, or law-abiding. They believe they inherently are good, so they see no need to be good.

Tom DeLay is basically the poster boy for this movement - we're talking about a man who thinks people who look at his photos can see Christ. Every time his opponents exposed his corruption or attacked his policies, he'd interpret it as an assault on Christianity. The more it became apparent that DeLay had flouted the laws of man, the more DeLay took refuge in religious terminology. Now, disgraced in the eyes of the nation and even his own party, he's rapidly heading toward Pat Robertson territory.

The Christian Right is a negative force in America today. It encourages politicians to be corrupt and to enact policies that harm the nation, and it often allows them to get away with it afterward. I have no problem with religion influencing politics, but when people start thinking that the two are one and the same, we've got trouble. Christianity will always be a powerful force in this nation, but we need to break the power of the Christian Right.

This is why Democrats and liberals need to avoid bashing Christianity and start figuring out ways to remind Christians that liberalism serves their interests. On issues like environmental protection, poverty reduction, stopping human trafficking and child abuse, and promoting religious freedom overseas, the tenets of Christianity are perfectly in line with liberal ideals.

If we can't break the link between Christianity and conservatism, we're just going to have another DeLay, and another, and another.


PS - on an unrelated topic, here is just about the best article on immigration I've ever read. It (almost) all the right reasons why we should let in more immigrants and avoid persecuting illegals. And, strangely, it appeared in The National Review, a conservative magazine that commonly bashes illegal immigrants. Odd.