DeLay, pesticides and the noxious insects of government ... by gimleteye

Tom DeLay, former GOP House Majority Leader, is headed to the slammer. How quickly we forget. DeLay was spawned by the pesticide business in Texas. I learned everything I needed to know about politicians fueled by the pesticide industry back in the Florida Keys in the 1990's, where the county commission was controlled by an arrogant pesticide service entrepreneur turned county commissioner, Doug Jones.

In Jones' world view, the only thing standing in the way from making money from killing bugs was government. Bugs were big business in the Keys, where getting rid of mosquitoes also included suppressing environmentalists. All you need to know about the origins of today's virulent strain of anti-government politics today is that it ties back to pesticides, like the ones that gave Tom DeLay and Doug Jones their credibility with the really big polluters. Like oil producers or sugar growers in the Everglades Agricultural Area.

Jones was embraced by the Florida Keys Chamber of Commerce as exactly the sort of politician who could stir public passions against all manner of government regulations, but especially environmental ones. He led the county commission known at the time as the Concrete Coalition in the Keys, in favor of all development and against any land use regulations with the same antagonism that is spurring the Florida Legislature and Governor Rick Scott, now, to decapitate the Florida Department of Community Affairs. DeLay liked to call the U.S. EPA, "Gestapo".

For Tom DeLay, whose influence at the time was on the order of John Boehner in Congress today, the crimes of big government were encapsulated by protections for the environment. It is what Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin rail against. It is the pot of hatred that Rush Limbaugh loves to stir. The bitter animosities that the conservative right have sprayed, like a big can of Raid, come from a pantheon of leaders that still prominently feature Lee Atwater, Karl Rove, Tom DeLay, Jeb Bush, Mitch McConnell, et al. From that can of political Raid, and from Tom DeLay's antagonism toward anything that would hinder his right to kill regulations that hindered his business from killing bugs, one can draw a straight line to last week's political assassination in Arizona.

Protecting the environment, in DeLay's pesticide frozen brain, impinged on the constitutional right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness". If you want to know the enterprises funding conservative foundations giving wings to the Tea Party and radical extremists in the GOP, you don't have to look much further than polluters whose main goal is not Obamacare or taxes, even though this is what makes nightly TV news. What they care about is finishing off what DeLay set out to do: knee-capping the U.S. EPA. It is not why Tom DeLay is going to jail. His prison sentence ties to pedestrian corruption related to political fundraising and redistricting; all necessary to control Texas, Congress, and advance the agenda to kill the noxious insects of government.