Now's the time to stomp on the foot with the bullet hole in it...

Yeah, I know, we're all sick of this bullshit, but here's one more Op-Ed about DeLay/Schiavo/God. From the WaPo. Go read the whole thing.

For Tom DeLay, Terri Schiavo came along just in the nick of time. "One thing that God brought to us is Terri Schiavo, to help elevate the visibility of what is going on in America," DeLay told a group of Christian conservatives last Friday.

And what, exactly, is going on in the United States? "Attacks against the conservative movement, against me and against many others," DeLay told his flock. So God has now thrown in with DeLay in his efforts to pack the House ethics committee with his allies so that he no longer need be the subject of the scrutiny and censure of his peers.

At its topmost ranks, and not only there, the party of Lincoln has become the party of Elmer Gantry. It peddles miracle cures and elixirs of life, to the benefit of the preachers, not the patients. When it comes to promoting real cures, today's Republicans are nowhere to be found. The Medicaid cuts pushed by the White House and passed by House Republicans last week would, if enacted into law, shorten the lives of numerous poor Americans living in conscious, not vegetative states. But that's a topic of no demonstrable interest to Christian conservatives, though I've yet to come across the biblical passage that exempts them from such concerns.

In their haste to curry favor with the Christian right, the Republican leaders have run roughshod over some very deeply rooted American -- and conservative -- beliefs. Americans tend to believe in their doctors, and in the sanctity of the doctor-patient relationship. They believe in spheres of privacy where the state cannot intrude. There's no more distinctly American belief than the right to be left alone by government. Liberals and conservatives differ over which great causes compel a suspension of that right, but both sides of the spectrum acknowledge it axiomatically.

As with Social Security, the Republicans are now going too far, promoting priorities of party in-groups that don't resonate at all with the larger public. This is classic second-term overreaching, mixed in with the most myopic opportunism. The real opportunity here is for the Democrats, if they have sense enough to realize it.

Yeah, like that'll happen. It better happen soon or the country is toast. The more these Republican bastards get away with, the more they'll try to get away with. This may be a good moment for the Dems to pounce on an especially egregious 'Pub outrage, so they better do it. Another opportunity like this may not come again for a week or two.