Trips back home to Atlanta are always a mixed blessing. I, of course, relish the time spent with my mother and two sisters and their families. However, after three days, the blinkered boosterism of a sprawl-mad city, which has snuffed out any pleasant vestiges of my adolescence, and the willful delusions of Red State America begin to suffocate me. After five days, I'm ready to be medevaced to my adopted home in true blue New England, pumped full of oxygen and speed-read the journals of Henry David Thoreau. For the next week after my return, I find myself wondering how both places can possibly belong to the same nation.
My most recent trip coincided with the news of Tom "the Hammer" DeLay's indictment. It is cause for celebration for Americans of all political persuasions when the most corrupt man in modern politics is forced to step down from his leadership post. It is the equivalent of a Nigerian coup leader succumbing to a heart attack or a Taliban leader spontaneously combusting. It is, in short, a paradigm shift that will reshape the political landscape at least until the 2006 elections. It is certainly worthy of major news coverage, not the usual he said-she said of Washington political punditry.
Naturally, then, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution — the largest circulating daily newspaper in the "New South" — downplayed the story, giving it equal billing on page one with some ridiculous initiative put forward by the Republican governor, a grown man named "Sonny." When I asked my Atlanta filmmaker friend Steve about this disconnect from reality, he said the AJC , in an attempt to live down its "liberal" (read: moderate) image, does this to pander to the Republicans and racists and homophobes in outlying suburbs like Cobb County, lest they all cancel their subscriptions en masse at the slightest whiff of fair and balanced news coverage.
The main story by the AJC 's two Washington correspondents was given over almost entirely to the regurgitations of DeLay's Mob-boss-style denials of wrongdoing ("they got nuttin' on me") and his bizarrely bemused attacks on the grand jury itself, to which he refused an open invitation to testify (though he claimed they never asked him). Then there were the arrogant testimonials as to his client's unblemished character by DeLay's sleazy lawyer who, when later pressed on network television, admitted he hadn't read the charges. Then, from top to bottom, every Republican quoted in the story praised DeLay to the heavens and called District Attorney Ronnie Earle's indictment a "political witch hunt." Included in this lineup of usual suspects were Bush stooges Scott McLellan, Dennis Hastert, and even the faceless apparatchik replacing him, Forrest Gump Blunt, who has his own trail of corruption preceding him into the room.
My favorite was the op-ed in the AJC by a member of the state delegation, Rep. Lynn Westmoreland (R-GA), that for sheer idiocy rivals anything ever written, said, belched or urinated by Billy Carter. Westmoreland, playing to his zombie base, portrayed the indictment as a completely partisan political action, resulting in this strange sentence: "It doesn't take a Ph.D. in political science to figure out the Democrats would like to shoot him in the knee caps." Never mind that the opening and closing sentences of Westmoreland's diatribe directly contradicted themselves: "Regardless of what a Texas jury decides about the guilt or innocence of Rep. Tom DeLay …" vs. "Once DeLay is exonerated…" Never mind that there was no Democratic response on the op-ed page (the only Democrat quoted in the AJC 's news story was Howard Dean and that was only briefly, at the very end of the piece).
This sort of tepid coverage went on for two days and then the story was dropped. It disappeared down the memory hole, exactly where the Republicans want it.
Something smelled fishy about the aggressively sanctimonious stance of the Republican leaders. They were too defiant, too lavish in their praises of DeLay, too certain of his ultimate exoneration. It was like Bush telling Michael Brown, after five days of miserable failure in New Orleans, "You're doing a great job, Brownie!"
You can bet the mortgage that the Republican leadership is relieved that Ronnie Earle has indicted DeLay, who is seen as nothing but an albatross around their necks. The louder they denounce Earle, the more they secretly love him. DeLay's high national profile notwithstanding, he only won reelection in his Houston district by 55 percent in 2004 and faces the embarrassing possibility of being defeated by a strong Democratic candidate in 2006. How would that look? The party leader can't even win a fixed election in his own rinky-dink district?
No, Tom DeLay is not a popular man. He was a powerful man once upon a time before last week. And, because power is the only thing Republicans respect anymore, his name is being removed from the marquee even as we speak.
