Matt Taibbi on Tom DeLay in Rolling Stone (May 4, 2006):

Tom DeLay was the Stalin of the Republican revolution. The difference is we caught him in time.

The right-wing revolution started out as all revolutions start out: as a piece of upper-class political theater that used the unwashed masses as a stage prop, a pair of crossed pistols on the wall. It wa salways absurd, this idea of a savage campaign against "elites" being led by a poofy wordsmith like Rush Limbaugh, a Harvard fatty like Grover Norquist, a dickless academic like Newt Gingrich, and a diaper-dumping oligarch like George W. Bush. They were just another band of mischievous aristocrats who played at being the voice of the common man -- these new wingers sold themselves as the champions of the fucked-over little guy, in this case the terminally frustrated boobus Americanus, who for decades had been made to sit idly by while ethnics stole his job, evil liberals mocked his religion and his simple way of life, and media "elitists" shut out his views and sent porn and married queers into his living room via the television set.

What made Tom DeLay different is that Tom DeLay was a little guy. . . . He came from the dirt of the South, with a drunken reprobate for a father and nothing but white trash in his family tree. . . . [He] dropped out of Baylor after being inveigled in a childish campus-vandalism scandal. His pre-politics career as a rat and bug killer was marked by a continual failure that has to be considered shocking in a state so teeming with vermin: An exterminator failing in southeast Texas is like a pimp failing in Bangkok during tourist season.

Gingrich and Limbaugh only played at being an American loser; Tom DeLay actually was one. . . .

In the Russian Revolution, Stalin was the penniless, crude, tongue-tied seminary dropout kept in the movement as a hanger-on by brilliant, swashbuckling orators and theorists like Trotsky, Lenin and Bukharin, who all cynically pretended at fellowship with their darkish brute ethnic comrade. Stalin knew better, and by the time he solidified his grip on power, it was those same handsome intellectuals who ended up crawling ont he floors of Moscow garages with bullets in their livers. The famously vengeful DeLay was on the way to remaking his party in the same way, disdaining charistmatic talkers like Gingrich and Bob Livingston and replacing their type in the apparatus of Washington -- not onlyin Congress but in the lobbies and the think tanks, who were often forced to comply with his litmus-test hiring preferences -- with his faceless, dependable, snake-mean Christian cronies.

What was terrifying about DeLay was that he was the barking voice of that afternoon talk-radio caller given full reign of Washington. He was that same angry lout, not invoked and used by clever academics and con men, but actually in charge: a narrow, selfish, envious, mean-spirited prick who had the whole capital on its kneew. What kind of man was he? He only went into national politics in the first place because the federal government had banned a potentially carcinogenic pesticide called Mirex that DeLay had used to kill ants. That was his idea of injustice.

Same issue has a piece by Sean Wilentz assessing whether George W. Bush is the worst president in US history. Haven't read it yet, but you know the answer as well as I do. Notable that the title graphic shows Bush and Cheney in black heist gear with the latter clutching a pile of gold.

If you scan back through American history, one thing you notice is how many mediocrities wound up in the White House, and another is that the trend has mostly been downhill. The only post-WWII presidents who had actually accomplished anything before they got into politics were Carter and Eisenhower -- Reagan's acting career doesn't count, since his presidency was an extension, and trivialization, of his acting -- and both were diminished by the job. Kennedy and Clinton may have thought of politics as a noble public service, but for both it was also a tremendous ego trip, not to mention a good way to get laid.

Still, one lesson of the modern age is that politics is a lousy job. Otherwise, why is it that so many lousy people not only gravitate toward it but wind up as its major success stories. You'd think that a nation as successful as America clearly is, with so many brilliant, dedicated, hard-working people, would be able to support a respectable class of politicians and public servants, but that doesn't seem to be the case. For most of recent history, the powers in the private sector have muddled through by controlling the politicians' purse strings, but more and more narrow-minded con artists like DeLay, Abramoff, Cheney and Bush have learned how to scam the system.

Chinese Prime Minister Hu shrewdly read this system in paying his first respects to Boeing and Microsoft before making a rather pointless, purely ceremonial curtesy call on Bush. He correctly recognized that Bush isn't the leader of a great nation. He's just the stooge who occupies the White House.