Behind the DeLay indictment: vicious infighting within the US ruling elite

The divisions cut across the partisan divide between Democrats and Republicans. More significant than the predictable and superficial gloating by congressional Democrats is the tepid support—and even outright criticism—which DeLay has received from sections of the Republican Party.

While DeLay’s support is centered in the Christian fundamentalist groups, spokesmen for the financial interests and the neo-conservatives who have spearheaded the war in Iraq have seized on DeLay’s difficulties as an opportunity to advance their political agenda.

The Wall Street Journal, for instance, published an editorial Saturday which criticized the Republican majority in the House of Representatives for its abandonment of budget-cutting initiatives in favor of pork-barrel spending to help consolidate the power of the Republican Party. “No one typified this more than Mr. DeLay, who has always been more fiercely partisan than he is conservative,” the Journal wrote. “Nothing typified that more than Mr. DeLay’s comments on September 13, when he declared post-Katrina that there was nothing left in the federal budget to cut. They had already trimmed all the fat.”

The newspaper, which reliably translates the thinking of broad sections of the financial oligarchy into political invective, complained that the Republican Congress had accomplished little since the 2003 tax cuts. Funneling another $700 billion into the pockets of the super-rich was all well and good, the Journal seemed to say, but where was the other side of the budget equation—the corresponding cuts in social spending for the poor and the working population?

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http://wsws.org/articles/2005/oct2005/dela-o03.shtml