DeLay and Rostenkowski, No Surprises There
Tom DeLay just won his party’s nomination for this fall's mid-term election from his district in Texas and won it big-time. Some people find that incredible, what with Tom under indictment and who knows what revelations almost sure to surface from Jack Abramoff’s plea deal.
How could anyone possibly vote for such a questionable guy?
Easy. Not only easy, but predictable. Those Republican wannabes who lined up to take Tom’s seat away didn’t have a clue.
I learned this first-hand from having lived in Chicago during the Dan Rostenkowski scandal, back in the dark ages of 1994. Dan, or “Rosty” as he was affectionately known in the finer circles of Chicago politics, got slammed with seventeen counts of mail and wire-fraud and abuse of office for the way he ran his House of Representatives office. The most embarrassing charge was that he got franking stamps from the House Post Office and sold them for pocket-change.
Chicago never blinked an eye. From the 1890s to the 1990s, nothing much changed a…