The Beginning of the End of the "Conservative Movement"

I put that in quotation marks because the "conservative movement" has been moving through the viscera of the body politic of America and is about to exit in a burning splatter into the toilet of history. As Tom "Giant Flying Cockroach" DeLay slithers down toward the sewer, he's grabbing anything and anyone he can claw toward him to slow his slide. Here's the latest, courtesy of Moonie-funded Washington Times:

Morton Blackwell, Republican National Committee member from Virginia and a member of ACU's board, said Republicans are being told support for Mr. DeLay is mandatory if they want future support from conservatives.
"Conservative leaders across the country are working now to make sure that any politician who hopes to have conservative support in the future had better be in the forefront as we attack those who attack Tom DeLay," he said.

The internal pressure inside the Republican Party must be building exponentially as members are confronted with this Faustian choice, but one hopes that either some crumb of decency, self-preservation, or recognition that DeLay is doomed will propel many members to realize that falling into line behind DeLay means slipping on his slime down the same shit-encrusted hole of infamy and possibly prison. Now that DeLay has taken to threatening federal judges, he's revealed to all but the most fanatical as batshit desperate. That makes him positively radioactive to his fellow politicians, because he has slipped into absolute survival mode. I think that his enablers are realizing how vulnerable they have become, since a guy like DeLay is going to have methodically catalogued every little thing he can use for leverage in his career, and I'll bet some of it is pretty damning for others.

The knives will come out pretty quickly, I think, as DeLay's ruthless tactics get turned back on him. Blackwell's conflation of DeLay with the party itself is a huge gamble that he will lose, because the past strongarming of members has created a lot of resentment--the "movement" is not held together by ideology, but by intimidation. When the ranks begin to break, it will be catastrophic for party unity.

At least I hope that's the case. Shall we pray?