News Intelligence Analysis
Tom DeLay: He Says He's Leaving, But Don't You
Believe Him
Plus a Compendium of Reactions on Delay's Departure
Tom DeLay: He Says He's Leaving, But Don't You Believe Him
By Edith Earle Fonder
Special
to the Yurica Report
I remember, clear as sunshine breaking through the clouds on a rainy day, all about the biggest crook we ever had in our little town in Mississippi! He was rotund and had a big voice. He could snap a finger and politicians would faint on the spot. Lucius Bob Beamer was makin' a livin' baking shortbread in our only bakery in Sessina, which, if you want to know used to be three miles straight as an arrow out of Cupcake, Mississipi during the 1940's when God called him to become a "Political Boss!" That's what he said happened! He quit baking shortbread and built himself into power. You see, Lucius made himself into a political-bully-machine. He paid three little kids a nickel a day to carry his messages to shop owners and government officials. He hand wrote his notes and they always said the same thing: "If you want to continue to live in this town, I reckon you owe me $50 by next Tuesday."
Lucius had no trouble collecting money! Lucius had no trouble gettin' rides with folks who had big Buicks and Pontiacs! Lucius was a crook! Now when you're as old as I am, you can conjure up those old memories and let them loose on your kin and usually folks will get the idea you're trying to draw out.
Tom DeLay is the closest thing we've seen in nearly sixty-five years of true, honest-to-Dixie-low-down-lying, bribing, and bullying everyone in sight and collecting favors from big corporations and from powerful lobbyists! I mean, his imagination is worth payin' attention to: the man actually said: "I am the Government!" Now that's big-really big. A person has to swallow and gulp that sentence into comprehension. I mean Tom DeLay isn't messin' around with no little town outside Tupelo! He set himself up as King of the United States government and threw in Congress just for fun! Now you don't mess with power like that-it isn't wise. Forget the fact that he's been indicted for criminal offenses and folks who used to work for him have made deals with the prosecutors to tell all they know-for lighter sentences-forget that. That's just business as usual with the Republicans in Congress. They're almost all under suspicion of takin' money from big corporations and from Jack Abramoff! (And keep in mind that Jack Abramoff never gave a dime to a Democrat!)
No, forget all that. Power is power. Tom DeLay intends to continue to build America into his church or vice versa. You see, he knows that the only true power in a democracy has to come from God Himself, because as a famous Supreme Court Justice has pointed out, else the only authority of the state is from all the individuals who voted and that's not high enough for church people or the Justice because all us citizens are morally teeny in the eyes of God, the eyes of the Justice who said it, and in the eyes of Tom DeLay. So Tom DeLay says he wants to break down the concept of the separation of church and state after he resigns. Now if you think about his personality and what he claimed to be: "I am the Government," you can tell right away where he's heading: if the Justice who said it is right, then Tom's got no where else to go, but to proclaim himself the ultimate authority: all power comes from Tom DeLay who sits on the Right Hand of God Almighty-or so it looks like the plans that he has have laid out. And as far as I can tell, there's thirty million Evangelicals and Catholics who will believe it and vote it in! So don't think Tom "I am the Government" is leaving; he's just taking his methodology of crookedness, intimidation and domination a little higher!
Edith Earl Fonder is a pseudonym for a Yurica Report Editor, but we don't want anyone to know it! Shhh! To read another one like it read below:
J. Kenneth Blackwell:
There He
Goes Again
By Edith Earle Fonder
(With Apologies to Eudora Welty)
Now just look what’s happenin’
in the great state
of Ohio! Here comes this little pip squeak Ken
Blackwell runnin’ for governor before he’s learned
how to supervise one single honest election in that
state! How do you figure these folks? Now, I don’t
want anyone getting the wrong idea. I am a southerner,
and to me, Ohio will always be southern! They had the
good sense to name Ohio State after the best football
team
in America!
Reactions to Tom DeLay's Announcement:
From the Progress Report:
CORRUPTION
DeLay to Resign, But His House Still Stands
Criminally-indicted Rep. Tom DeLay (R-TX) announced last night that "he will not seek reelection and will leave Congress within months." According to DeLay, he has been chosen as a "target" because he was "effective" and accomplished "some pretty amazing things." But the truth is that Tom DeLay's extensive corruption and bitter ultra-partisan activism had finally caught up with him -- costing him his Majority Leader title, turning him into a national political pariah, and eventually shifting his conservative Texas district against him. DeLay will reportedly leave Congress by the end of May, and says he plans to "pursue an aggressive speaking and organizing campaign aimed at promoting foster care, Republican candidates and a closer connection between religion and government." But despite his absence, the House of Representatives will remain the House of DeLay. The overwhelming majority of House conservatives supported the "DeLay Rule" that was "custom tailored for Majority Leader DeLay to avoid stepping down even after indictment." House conservatives rigged the ethics committee to protect DeLay from being penalized. And they rushed to his side with support even after the full extent of his corruption became evident. As Josh Marshall writes, "He's their guy. Their rule rests on his machine. They can run but they can't hide."
From The Nation Editor's Comments:
Tom DeLay's war on American democracy--which included not just radical gerrymandering and the formalization of pay-to-play policy-making in Washington but the crude manipulation of the recount that made George Bush President--is finally coming to a close.
However, as John Nichols argues, his greatest crimes will go unpunished, at least for so long as the Congress Tom DeLay created and the presidency that he made possible continue to punish America and the world.
And why did the Hammer quit when he did? Maybe, as Ari Berman speculates, because he thought Democrats might retake the House.
From MoveOn.org
Today's news that Republican leader Tom DeLay will resign from Congress is a great victory for the values of MoveOn members and all Americans.
The DeLay story isn't about one man from Texas. It is about a political movement made up of Republicans and conservatives that lost its way and came to care more about itself than America. DeLay has been the symbol of that fall. But the stubborn refusal by Republicans to abandon Delay showed the entire country that the corruption is pervasive.
Today, for at least one day, the decency and honesty of Americans has prevailed.
From TruthOut.org
He's Gone
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Tuesday 04 April 2006
Rat in a drain ditch,
Caught on a limb,
You know better
But I know him.
Like I told you,
What I said,
Steal your face
Right off your head.
Now he's gone, gone,
Lord he's gone, he's gone.
Like a steam locomotive,
Rollin' down the track
He's gone, gone,
Nothing's gonna bring him back.
He's gone.
- The Grateful Dead, "He's Gone"
Stone the crows. Tom DeLay is checking out.
"I'm going to announce tomorrow that I'm not running for reelection and that I'm going to leave Congress," said DeLay on Monday. "I'm very much at peace with it."
Never thought I'd live to see the day.
In 1988, DeLay gave a press conference in Texas to defend the military record of Dan Quayle, who had been tapped to accompany George H. W. Bush on the Republican presidential ticket. Quayle was under fire for having allegedly used family influence to secure him a safe spot in the Indiana National Guard, thus keeping him out of Vietnam. DeLay argued that Quayle's failure to serve in Vietnam was not his fault; he wanted to go, but minorities had taken all the available slots.
Seriously, he said that.
This is the man who once said, in a debate about the minimum wage, "Emotional appeals about working families trying to get by on $4.25 an hour are hard to resist. Fortunately, such families do not exist."
This is the man who once said, in a speech to bankers delivered eight days before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, "Nothing is more important in the face of a war than cutting taxes."
This is the man who once said, to a government employee who was trying to stop him from smoking on government property, "I am the federal government."
This man is gone now. After being indicted in Texas for campaign finance violations arising from his redistricting scheme, after surviving a tight primary challenge while staring down the barrel of a well-financed Democratic challenger, after watching his press secretary Michael Scanlon and his deputy chief of staff Tony Rudy cop pleas in the Jack Abramoff scandal investigation, after watching Rudy specifically accuse his chief of staff Ed Buckham of being neck-deep in the scandal in his plea confession, after sitting up nights wondering if the Abramoff scandal was going to land him in prison, DeLay decided enough was enough.
Time Magazine, which carried one of the first reports of his decision to step down, has DeLay adamantly denying any wrongdoing. "Asked if he had done anything illegal or immoral in public office," read the report by Mike Allen, "DeLay replied curtly, 'No.' Asked if he'd done anything immoral, he said with a laugh, 'We're all sinners.'"
It was the Democratic party that did this to him, of course. Wait, sorry. It was the "Democrat" party.
"I guarantee you," continued DeLay in the report, "if other offices were under the scrutiny I've been under in the last 10 years, with the Democrat Party announcing that they're going to destroy me, destroy my reputation, and that's how they're going to get rid of me, I guarantee you you're going to find, out of hundreds of people, somebody that's probably done something wrong."
That's right, Tom. It was the Democrat party, that awesome juggernaut of competence, which has shown time and again lo these past few years its Zeus-like ability to hurl devastating political lightning bolts from its lofty position, that took you down. They can stand up next to a mountain, so I hear, and chop it down with the edge of their hand.
Or maybe, Tom, just maybe, all this happened because you are the living embodiment of absolutely everything wrong in American politics. Forget your ideology, and your hateful divisiveness, and your shameless canoodling with the Taliban wing of fundamentalist Christianity. One cannot swing a cat by the tail in Washington DC these days without smacking someone who thinks the way you do. This doesn't make you unique, sadly.
No, your criminal misuse of the campaign funding laws, your outright disdain for the rules if they keep you from assuming absolute control, your almost Zen-like ability to operate beyond the confines of conscience and dignity, is why your presence has been a cancer on the body politic since the day you put down your bug extermination gear and tried a power tie on for size, and is why you're finished now. How deeply were you in the pocket of your contributors? You took an R.J. Reynolds corporate jet to get to your arraignment. There has to be some kind of award somewhere for behavior so brazenly craven.
It is hard to avoid a sense that something like justice, true justice, real justice, has been well served by the manner in which Tom DeLay has been laid low. Politics is a little cleaner today. Not a lot, maybe not even enough for folks to notice, but it is indeed just a little bit cleaner, now that he's gone.
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Related Article:
Tom Delay:
A Partisan Leaves; Will an Era Follow?
By ROBIN TONER
WASHINGTON, April 4 — Representative Tom DeLay
was the last man standing among the top three
Republicans who took control of the House after the
1994 Republican landslide, and he leaves, in many
ways, the most complex and contentious legacy from
their conservative reign
on Capitol Hill.
Directory of Scandals
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