Like a Fine Wine With a Good Meal

Billmon's latest is yet another gem. Here's the conclusion, but please take the time to read it all:

Political scandals choose from a relative handful of scripts, I suppose -- just as Joseph Campbell once theorized that all human myths spring from a relative handful of archtypes. That being the case, it's probably not surprising that the decline and fall of Jim Wright and Tony Coehlo foreshadowed the decline and possible fall of the Bug Man.

There are differences, of course. Wright and Coehlo divided the basic tasks of power -- with Wright pulling the legislative strings and Coehlo acting as the bag man. DeLay combines both functions.

The Bug Man has also managed to do things that Wright and Coehlo at the height of their power never tried to do, at least to my knowledge: Like forcing a partisan affirmative action plan on K Street, complete with goals and timetables, or packing the ethics committee with his closest cronies, then changing the rules to essentially neuter the panel.

But the Democrats, even at their worst, had at least some lingering sense of shame. The modern GOP machine, as far as I can tell, has absolutely none -- which probably explains why the Republican majority has been able in a decade to sink to levels of corruption it took the Democratic majority almost three generations to reach.

The stories may also end differently -- probably will end differently, since I have a hard time seeing the Bug Man slinking off into retirement like Jim Wright. As Barney Frank has already noted, the Republican Caucus has a hell of a lot more invested in Tom DeLay -- emotionally, politically and not least financially -- than the Democrats of the '80s ever had invested in Jim Wright. So you'd have to say the odds are that this scandal is going to get much, much uglier before it's over, and leave the House even more of a smoking partisan crater than its '80s predecessor did.

Which I would never have thought possible at the time.