A sampling of Judeo-Christian values - by Tom Delay

The values exibited thus far are - greed, hypocrisy, favor-selling, dissembling - belonging to no creed except the ruthless pursuit of power. These values are not exclusive to either political party or Mr. Delay. But the religious trappings add a note that distinguishes this Beltway creep from those who have come before: a supreme righteousness that often spirals into anger and fire-and-brimstone zealotry that can do far more damage to America than ill-begotten golf junkets.

It's not for nothing that Mr. DeLay's nickname is the Hammer. Or that early in his Christian Coalition career, Ralph Reed (a Republican lobbyist who once headed the Christian Coalition) famously told a Knight-Ridder reporter that DeLay wanted to see his opponents in a "body bag." The current manifestation of this brand of religious politics can be found in the far right's anti-judiciary campaign, of which Mr. DeLay is the patron saint. As he flew off to the pope's funeral in Rome, the congressman left behind a rabble-rousing video for a Washington conference on "Confronting the Judicial War on Faith" staged by a new outfit called The Judeo-Christian Council for Constitutional Restoration. Another speaker, a lawyer named Edwin Vieira, twice invoked a Stalin dictum whose unexpurgated version goes, "Death solves all problems; no man, no problem." The reporter who covered the event for The Washington Post, Dana Milbank, suggested in print that one prime target of the vitriol, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, might want to get "a few more bodyguards." It wasn't necessarily a joke.