Rich's Overview of Washington Scandal

Last week I posted a link to Frank Rich's NYTimes column that now lives behind the subscriber curtain. It garnered a number of hits, so there are a lot of people looking for what he has to say. (I actually think this is an unintended consequence of The Times's action of putting its columnists off limits. Back when they were freely available, although I'd generally read Rich every week, I'd drop in on Dowd, Krugman, Friedman, or Herbert only every now and again, particularly if there seemed to be some buzz around a particular column. Now, that I'm actively prevented from reading them, my interest in finding a way to get them every day is much higher. I'm sure I'm not alone.)

This week, Rich takes a wide-angle look at the various investigations and incriminations of leading Republicans. Here's his lead:

"Terri Schiavo is not brain-dead; she talks and she laughs, and she expresses happiness and discomfort. Terri Schiavo is not on life support."
- Tom DeLay, March 20, 2005

If you believed Tom DeLay then, you no doubt believe now that the deposed House majority leader is only on "temporary" leave from his powerful perch in Washington and that he’ll soon bounce back, laughing all the way, from a partisan witch hunt that unjustly requires his brief discomfort in a Texas courtroom.

Those who still live in the reality-based community, however, may sense they’re watching the beginning of the end of something big. It’s not just Mr. DeLay, a k a the Hammer, who is on life support, but a Washington establishment whose infatuation with power and money has contaminated nearly every limb of government and turned off a public that by two to one finds the country on the wrong track.

And one more snippet:

Mr. DeLay's latest plight is only a tiny detail within this vast Boschian canvas of depravity. If this were Watergate - and Watergate itself increasingly looks like a relatively contained epidemic of corruption - the Texas grand jury's indictment of the congressman and his associates would be a sideshow tantamount to the initial 1973 California grand jury indictment of the Nixon aide John Ehrlichman and his pals in the break-in at Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office; Watergate's real legal fireworks were still in the wings. So forget about all those details down in Texas that make your teeth hurt; don't bother to learn the difference between Trmpac and Armpac. Fasten your seat belt instead for the roller coaster of other revelations and possible indictments that's about to roar through the Beltway.

I've found the full column from another couple of bloggers, Cyphering and The Political Puzzle, so click over there if you want to read the whole thing. (Or, you could go to the column itself at TimesSelect and buy a sub or start their 14-day free trial.)