The Hightower Lowdown

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THE ASSAULT ON THE TRUE AMERICA

It's September 11 -- do you know where John Ashcroft is?

Two years after al Qaeda's assault on America, two years after the Bush-Cheney-Ashcroft axis of absurdity spent untold billions of our tax dollars to lock down America, do you feel safer? Or, do you feel taken?

Personally, it's not foreign terrorists who scare me. Yes, they can do some bodily harm to us, but they can't take our liberties from us; they can't militarize our society; they can't dim the light of America's democratic beacon; they can't force our people into imperialistic wars to make the world safe for Halliburton; they can't change the essential principles of liberty, justice, and egalitarianism that undergird our nation. But our leaders can ... and they are.

What scare me are the homegrown zealots now in high office who are using a veil of patriotism to impose a police-state mentality on our Land of the Free. The Bushites have had two years to work their will, and it's now time for us to speak bluntly: These people are nuts! They're also dangerous.

They've shoved us into an undefined and endless war, blindsided us with the scurrilous PATRIOT Act, opened everything from our bank accounts to our library records to their Orwellian prying, perverted the priorities of our public spending, and insisted that they can operate in secrecy and above the law -- all in the name of stopping terrorism, which actually has been made a greater threat to us than ever.

The emperor has no clothes. In fact, he's buck naked and butt ugly, and we can no longer be silent in the face of what adds up to a wholesale assault on the true America. Sam Adams, the leader of the Sons of Liberty and the Boston Tea Party, alerted us to this danger a couple of centuries ago: "If ever a time should come when vain and aspiring men shall possess the highest seats in government, our country will stand in need of experienced patriots to prevent its ruin." Now is that time.

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DELAY'S JUDICIAL WITCH-HUNT

Sound the alarms! Bring the children indoors! Call out the gendarmes! Tom "Mad Dog" DeLay is off his leash again!

The Texas Republican is majority leader of the U.S. House, and the more power he gets, the weirder he becomes. Remember the egomaniacal extremism of Newt Gingrich? DeLay is Newt on Viagra -- not a pretty image.

A former pest exterminator from the Houston suburbs, he has steadily wormed and squirmed his way to the political top, effectively becoming "Boss of the House." He's done it by making himself the legislative point person for the most extreme right-wing groups, by creating a far-flung network of rabidly partisan political operatives throughout the country, and by using his public position to extract huge sums of campaign money from corporate lobbyists who need legislative favors. Indeed, DeLay is known as "the Hammer" for his mafialike demands that lobbyists give money only to Republicans -- and for his insistence that lobbying firms hire no Democrats, only Republicans ... or see their legislative demands die.

Not content to be a partisan monkey wrench in the House, he's now branching out to the supposedly independent judicial branch of government. In an unprecedented attempt at political intimidation, he has created a 13-member task force of House Republicans to monitor all decisions of all federal judges, with the blatant intention of browbeating any who fail to toe the right-wing and corporatist ideological lines. DeLay, doing his best imitation of Joe McCarthy's famous assault on government officials in the 1950s, unabashedly said, "Today, we in the House are putting America's judges on alert: 'We are watching you.'"

In describing the task force's mission, the chair of DeLay's new McCarthyesque witch-hunt uses language that hearkens back to Tom's exterminator days, saying that they're out to "disinfect" the judiciary.

DeLay is not merely a delusional nutball -- he's dangerous for our democracy. The exterminator has become the pest.