corrente

There's a moment in every movie: Dorothy throws the bucket of water on the Wicked Witch. Michael Moore reads from "1984." Darth Vader's ship goes spinning away as the Death Star explodes in the skies over Yavin 4*. You know, the moment when the bad guy gets his comeuppance?

Via WaPo towards whom I am feeling very kindly at the moment):

In May 2001, Enron's top lobbyists in Washington advised the company chairman that then-House Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) was pressing for a $100,000 contribution to his political action committee, in addition to the $250,000 the company had already pledged to the Republican Party that year.

DeLay requested that the new donation come from "a combination of corporate and personal money from Enron's executives," with the understanding that it would be partly spent on "the redistricting effort in Texas," said the e-mail to Kenneth L. Lay from lobbyists Rick Shapiro and Linda Robertson.

The e-mail, which surfaced in a subsequent federal probe of Houston-based Enron, is one of at least a dozen documents obtained by The Washington Post that show DeLay and his associates directed money from corporations and Washington lobbyists to Republican campaign coffers in Texas in 2001 and 2002 as part of a plan to redraw the state's congressional districts.

Texas law bars corporate financing of state legislature campaigns, and a Texas criminal prosecutor is in the 20th month of digging through records of the fundraising, looking at possible violations of at least three statutes.

Documents unearthed in the probe make clear that DeLay was central to creating and overseeing the fundraising.

Go read the rest when you get time. But from the looks of this, Gollum has just toppled into the Cracks of Doom, and Sauron's about to bite the big one.

UPDATE: *Thanks to alert reader Salvage who caught me putting two scenes together from two different movies where Darth Vader gets his comeuppance.

And to other alert readers who question the immediate significance of this story to the central issue of bringing down the Imperial stormtroopers...er, I mean the BushCo administration, this is an indirect strike. Tom DeLay used Enron and other illegal corporate money to hijack the redistricting of Texas. Getting that overturned is huge in itself. Getting rid of him personally is just a side benefit, albeit a particularly satisfying one because he is such a self-satisfied sanctimonius little creep.