The news today, ringing all across the land… Tom DeLay has won the Republican primary in his Texas district! Tommy’s back!

Naturally, it’s a giant victory, and a huge comeback! Vindication, rebirth, whatevuh! As DeLay puts it, the time for the “politics of personal destruction” is over, and “I have always placed my faith in voters, and today’s vote shows they have placed their full faith in me.” Right on, and so say all of us!

So there it is. Tom DeLay, back in the saddle, gettin’ the votes, recapturing our imagination with that same magical twinkle in his eye that he beguiled us with throughout the early part of this decade. Ex-teenyboppers, now in their early 20’s, should take their Tommy dolls and “DeLay! DeLunchboxes” out of mothballs and start cruising eBay. There’s money to be made!

Speaking of money, did you know that DeLay has raised more money for his campaign than any other House candidate? That’s right, almost 3 million bucks, 1.6 of which he already spent on yesterday’s primary.

But what a payoff! Okay, so barely one in ten people who voted in 2004 actually came out for this primary. But Tom Delay got himself more than 20,000 votes!! Only 38 percent of the Republicans who bothered to show up voted against him! A primary TRIUMPH, garnered at the low, low cost of $80 per vote.

Clearly, DeLaymania is back!

Some of the Ned Negatives and Amy Analyticals out there are going to try to take this away from Tom, away from us. They’re going to deny the groundswell of DeLay DeLove out there. They’re going to blabber on that having to spend $1.6 million to get 13% of the active electorate to vote for you might not bode well for the fall, when Our Man Tom will be facing an actual, funded opponent on an actual, well-publicized Election Day. They’ll peer over their thick glasses and mention that DeLay’s indictments aren’t going to simply go away, and that his likely connections to Jack Abramoff’s troubles aren’t going to vaporize either.

Oh, they’ll say that. And then they’ll have to eat their words come November, when legions of DeLay voters will march out of their suburban Houston houses and stage a voterrific DeLuge of DeMocracy! Me, I can’t wait for that. Because we Americans love a comeback, and that’s the truth! Even fake ones, because there’s no better way to have a real comeback than to stage a fake one first. It works! And it shows Pluck! Let’s face it folks, Tom DeLay is our Madonna, showing an ability to constantly reinvent himself and come back to once again challenge our preconceptions about what’s “right” and “good” and “honest.”

So let me be the first to say “Congratulations!” And “Welcome Back, Tommy.” It feels so right that it’s almost like you never left at all.