Sidbits, Act IV

about crybaby Tom DeLay and his hissy fit-turned-impeachment of the president of the United States.

I was always right about the impeachment not being so much about Clinton and his "wrongdoing," but that it was payback for the Republicans losing their sorry little asses during the 1998 elections (and with it, their delusion leader, Newt Gingrich):

"The Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee inhabited a world of their own and resisted intrusions that might upset it. They had expected they would win the midterm and believed with every fiber of their beings they should have. They knew they had lost the midterm because of their insistence on trying to impeach a popular president, but they could not reverse themselves. The more the White House tried to move forward from the election result, the more they rebelled against it. The more they thought about it, the more they believed they were right. Their losing, they decided, was another of Clintons's offenses [I submit it was the worst one by far]."

...

"Tom DeLay had always suspected Gingrich of weakness, had always regarded him as a rival. He had opposed him for whip in 1989, and with the Republican capture of the Congress in 1994 and Gingrich's elevation to Speaker, he had clawed his way into the post. After the government shutdowns of 1995 and 1996, when Republican senators had wanted to end the self-defeating conflict with the president, DeLay had said, 'Screw the Senate. It's time for all-out war!' Secretly, he had mobilized opposition to Gingrich, plotting to overthrow and replace him, yet when his internal coup had failed in 1997, his power was so secure that Gingrich dared not punish him. Now, with the equivocal Gingrich gone, Livingston quaked in DeLay's presence and did what DeLay told him to do.

"DeLay lacked Gingrich's patchwork of neuroses, and having seen how Gingrich had become a bogeyman by appearing constantly on television, drawn to the light like a helpless moth, he accepted only occasional guest spots on the talk shows, preferring to operate with the curtains drawn. DeLay's plotting was unrestrained; his machinations on behalf of impeachment were the Founders' nightmare of American politics turned Roman. He held his vanity in check to focus his wrath on the president--a wrath he believed was divinely inspired. In 2002, DeLay preached to the First Baptist Church of Pearland, Texas, that God was using him to promote, 'a biblical worldview' in politics, and that he had pushed for Clinton's impeachment because the president held the 'wrong worldview.'"

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Yeah, the "wrong worldview" like helping Democrats winning more seats in the House. If Gingrich was neurotic, then DeLay was and is something a whole hell of a lot worse.

Much more about the DeLay follies at the link.