"The Big Buy: Tom Delay's Stolen Congress"

Tom Delay is more than an abomination, he is a personal obsession of mine.  When I think about my hopes for humanism--the idea linked to or embodied in a hope that our species can and will create institutional and social progress--there is always the lurking specter of Tom Delay.  He is the extreme.  He is the exterminator.  The smiling face wielding a gas pipe.   His smug swagger reminds me about the oft-mentioned "crooked timber" of our sad species.

"The Big Buy:  Tom Delay's Stolen Congress" gives some hope.  It's a documentary made on the cheap and is sadly one-sided, but in the filmmakers' defense, it is difficult to be objective when Republicans can't be bothered to speak with you or even be held accountable.  After all, why should they?  Who would make them?  Voters?  Texas voters?!  But it is worth the watch and finely edited.  It also includes clips of an insurgent Delay from 1994 that are worth watching and re-watching.  

The movie follows Texas Congressman Tom Delay, the convicted money-launderer and criminal, on his sordid journey to and his quick escape from the nation's capital.  Vowing to "transform" D.C., he is one of the few public men to actually achieve what they set out to do.  Delay mobilized K Street lobbying money for conservative causes and was the bane to American liberals.  He helped intensify "regulatory capture" whereby government henhouses were purposely handed over to those of the vulpine persuasion.  But while the documentary seems to suggest that Delay is an aberration, a blip that is not part of the "real conservatism" of good-ole middle class folks, such a notion is simply untrue.  There is a reason that the right-wing small-government rhetoric is attractive to the same political forces that capture, control, and dismembered the regulatory state and have handed over contracts to privateers of every stripe:  This is conservatism.  It is "market-based," a model conservatives like President Bush hoped for in our national politics.  (The older term for "market-based" government is "corruption.")  Today, President Bush and John McCain and Mitt Romney can be cast aside as not "real," not "true," not "principled" conservatives.  But how can Delay be so spurn?  If ever there was someone who personified or distilled cynicism at the contemporary heart of market conservatism, it was he.  Service, the public, and the truth were all incidental to this man.  Power and its brutal infliction were the goal and the tactic.  "Business" (at least very "big business") grew, The National Endowment for the Arts was made the exemplar of wasteful spending, oil subsidies were put in the mail and Delay, a walking nightmare, was never defeated at the ballot box.  

The documentary's interviews with (the sorely missed) Molly Ivins and Jim Hightower are all-too brief but they capture the larger national impact of such a a small-town brute.  Delay, while never as powerful as LBJ, seems to be his reactionary inverse:  a grinning felon whose corruption couldn't even be peddled as "for the people," it was simply grasping for its own sake; the cheap demagoguery of a hired hand, the blunt instrument whose every move was motivated by self-interest or to comfort the comfortable.  He was the oilman's drill.  Enron's generator.  The insurance companies' own policy.  He reveled at the banks of microphones and bloomed before the dribblers and losers in College Republican audiences. 

If reading Thomas Frank's polemic The Wrecking Crew didn't make you weep or rage.  If Lou Dubose's book The Hammer didn't inspire you to picket or fly into the streets screaming for reform.  "The Big Buy" might not either.  But it will give you some perspective from real journalists and public servants, like Attorney General  Ronnie Earle, who fight for few rewards and against much harassment from the corporations and their legion of hacks and spinners.  It also shwos you the scoundrels who live after Delay's political demise.  For one, John Boehner, the current Majority Leader notorious for doling out tobacco company checks on the floor of the House while a tobacco bill was being considered.  By the end of the movie, Earle and the Texas scribblers are what hold you back from outright despair for the country.  And the species.