Outside the Capital Hilton on 16th Street in Washington one evening in May, you might have seen a demonstrator dressed like an old-fashioned carnival barker in a colorful vest and a straw boater. Around his neck he had hung a sign reading “DeLay is SCUM.” In a less politically polarized city, an observer might have thought that, even if the majority leader of the House of Representatives were guilty of everything being alleged against him, “scum” would not be quite the term that a rational person would use to describe him in a human environment that includes among its lower forms of life rapists and child-murderers. If Tom DeLay is scum, what is Saddam Hussein—one of whose political specialities was murdering children? But then there seems not to be a whole lot of overlap between those who think of Representative DeLay as scum and those who know or care about the crimes of Saddam Hussein. Politics in Washington these days exists in a hermetically sealed world of its own in which the rhetorical extremes are not only routinely resorted to but also bear little or no relation to anything outside it.

The extent of Tom DeLay’s misdeeds in allowing himself to come under the influence of monied interests might eventually prove to have reached farther than that of most members of Congress of both parties. As I write, his detractors are still having difficulty making this case, and even some from among the scandal-obsessed media are having