redeeming the irredeemable

i'm glad jack abramoff has agreed to cooperate with prosecutors.

it's easy to take the cynical view that he's only doing so to get a lighter sentence—and i'm sure that's part of it—but i'm convinced from seeing it up close that some folk forced to face their wrongs feel real shame and sincerely want to atone, so i give him the benefit of the doubt.

tom delay, on the other hand, appears entirely unrepentant. he's said to be the biggest recipient of abramoff payoffs—tho so far his indictments are unrelated—so it'll be interesting to see how it shakes out.

confession's good for the soul, tom.

then again, delay may really believe he did nothing wrong. i knew a guy who killed his ex-girlfriend and insisted he got framed. the usual assumption is that somebody in his shoes is lying, but i'm pretty sure he had no conscious memory of the deed. he normally got his way by force of personality and never resorted to physical brutality, so when he lost control and beat someone to death, he may very well have repressed it so deep it will take years to recall.

delay's different. he's a true believer in the gop cause. like a lot of folk, he's convinced it's best for this country to have gops run it, so anything they do to get power is justified and therefore should be legal. he used the dough to build gop power, not to buy houses and yachts, so that makes it ok in his mind. it means nothing to him that he deprived some texans of effective representation, because he really thinks they're better represented by gops.

it's essentially the same mentality that got us into the iraq mess: our system's best, so we have a right—no, a duty!—to impose it on others.

american "exceptionalism."

or should i say "supremacy"?