Sympathy for the Devil

With Tom DeLay going down in self pitying flames blaming everyone but his own deeply corrupt self, one must wonder at the folks who have been marching lockstep with the most openly hypocritical regime in living memory. I chatted with a fiercely republican friend yesterday, having joke after joke at his expense. Usually he comes back with some memorized talking point laughing at his own cleverness and the fact that His party won...But not now. As unassailable evidence builds and builds making the case that his Party is nothing more than a pompously cufflinked organized crime syndicate, I wonder what he will do?

How does he feel as he faces the fact that god is NOT on his side? That his precious W is actually not even a very good liar?

My friend spent a very profitable lifetime selling insurance. His smile is photographically beaming but false and his eyes give him away. He is worried. He is beginning to feel a guilt that his Sunday piety will not erase.

At some level I feel a kind of pity for my friend and hundreds more like him, but I do not forgive him. I am angry at him and can bestow my own forgiveness when he rises off his knees and helps us fix this mess we are in due to his intellectual laziness and self delusional righteousness.

These people have harmed my country and my countymen. Only their own penance can save them.

Do they have the courage?

Steve

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Here is a very good piece in similar vein from Darksyde at Kos.

An excerpt:

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..Of all the people that unwittingly facilitated the Republican Culture of Corruption of which DeLay has come to represent, and the string of astonishing GOP failures stemming from the White House, perhaps the grass-roots religious-right deserve the most sympathy. I'm talking about the ordinary guys and gals. Most of those hard working folks were expertly handled by religious opportunists and misled into supporting some of the most immoral politicians ever to disgrace the halls of power. Their eyes and hearts were drawn skyward by the smooth political operators while their collective pockets were then picked by neoconservative policy...

...But it takes tremendous courage to question one's very identity. And it is likely humiliating to confront the possibility that trusted comrades in faith have so cleverly played them like a harp, played them with their deepest, personal spiritual beliefs...

kos