Well, it seems “the Hammer” may finally be coming down.

The recent indictment of Rep. Tom Delay has stripped the GOP enforcer of his House Majority Leader title for the time being and left him desperate and naked, like a puppy in the path of a snowblower, as Republicans scramble to distance themselves from the man they used to call “the Hammer” before stooping to kiss his ring.

The indictment—on charges of conspiracy to evade Texas election law and money laundering—has also given hope to a legion of sickly Democrats who are starving for anything to take the spotlight off their own lack of a firm stance on any substantive issue. Apparently the Dems were too busy losing elections and ceding social victories to realize what an evil prick Delay has always been.

The list of atrocities is staggering. He has said that federal judges “need to be intimidated” if they do not interpret the Constitution in a manner he deems correct. If “activist judges” don’t shape up, he said, “We’re going to have to go after them in a big way.”

In perhaps the most public abuse of his power, Delay pushed a redistricting plan through the Texas legislature that would effectively mandate the removal of five Democratic members of Congress from power, creating a congressional delegation made up of 22 Republicans—all white conservatives—and ten Democrats—all liberal, ethnic minorities. Then, when Democrats in the legislature fled to Oklahoma to prevent a vote on the plan, Delay apparently used Homeland Security and state police officials to track the whereabouts of the self-exiled legislators.

The real kick to the stones is that the recent money laundering charge—stemming from corporate political donations that were re-routed through the Republican National Committee to Texas legislative candidates—would not be the first offense for Delay. During his 2000 reelection campaign, Delay used campaign funds to pay his wife and daughter exorbitant salaries as “consultants,” with his daughter alone raking in around $60,000.

These are just a few of the publicly confirmed sins of this devout evangelical Christian. There are even darker, more sinister implications and accusations making the rounds of weblogs these days, and many of them seem less than paranoid, given what is known about “the Hammer.”

In the past five years my heart has been broken by our political leaders more times than an 18-year-old Warrant groupie, so it seems almost masochistic to get my hopes up about the thought of Tom Delay praying fervently in a Texas prison cell. But just imagine the possibilities.

Delay, still bearing the dapper Eisenhower-era political haircut, kneeling before a barred window, frantically searching the pages of his only contraband possession, a copy of The Purpose-Driven Life, for the section on how Jesus would keep his teeth clean if he were in prison.

Having sold his last Bible to his cellmate—also, coincidentally, nicknamed “Hammer,” but for different reasons—in exchange for an eight-ball and the sanctity of his GI tract, Delay weeps nightly, praying for the Rapture and memorizing quotes from Revelations to bookend the chapters of the autobiographical Greco-Roman tragedy he plans to publish from prison, Hammer Bound.

That would be fun, eh? He certainly deserves at least some version of that scene.

The fact is, even if he’s convicted, Delay is just the tip of the iceberg. He is merely the most noxious and brazen of a gang of low-rent thugs elected on the promise that they would take their policy cues from a What Would Jesus Do? bracelet. In reality, they’ve shown nothing but political avarice, shameless egomania, and a knack for selling their souls and the nation’s interests to the lowest possible bidder.

We can only hope that when the Hammer finally falls, he takes the whole sorry cast of this tragic political decade with him.