Delay Must Stay

If Tom goes, Slate asks who will fill his shoes?

However, Hendrick Heinburg reminds us that, when you really break down the political needs, Democrats need Delay to Stay- only if Rush Limbaugh himself were in office would there be a single more galvanizing caricature rich and ripe with built in cannon-fodder. The question is: how sustainable is the Delay Deathwatch? The usefulness of keeping Delay around at least a little while longer is multi-fold: he is a point of intense political division within the right as well as a person of great unifying capability for the left; the more he is kept in power but determinitedly embattled, the less effective and ridiculous he becomes; he stands as a powerful tool of counter-point for the Demos and Liberals at large- the more you demonize his positions and build them up as indicative of larger Repo and conservative corruptons and trends, the more effective you can build your own counter-weight policies.

This action has not even begun- the Liberals and Demos haven't even figured out how to peg Delay on the larger scheme of things. Herzberg concludes his piece with this:

So there you have it, the DeLay agenda: no separation of church and state, no judicial review, no right to privacy. Next to this, the President’s effort to repeal the New Deal social contract by phasing out Social Security is the mewing of a kitten. DeLay may stay or DeLay may go. But the real danger is not DeLay himself. It’s DeLay’s agenda. It’s his vision. It’s his “values.”

The more we are successful at injecting the whole of this agenda with the poison of Delay, the more this entire American vision becomes obscene and distant.