Cowardice Beats Hubris

“Tom of the Dead” finally runs away like a chickenhawk from an Army recruiter.

This from Time Online...

Monday, Apr. 03, 2006
Tom DeLay Says He Will Give Up His Seat
The embattled former Republican leader tells TIME that he will leave Congress and not seek reelection

By MIKE ALLEN/SUGAR LAND, TEXAS

Rep. Tom DeLay, whose iron hold on the House Republicans melted as a lobbying corruption scandal engulfed the Capitol, told TIME that he will not seek reelection and will leave Congress within months. Taking defiant swipes at "the left" and the press, he said he feels "liberated" and vowed to pursue an aggressive speaking and organizing campaign aimed at promoting foster care, Republican candidates and a closer connection between religion and government.

"I'm going to announce tomorrow that I'm not running for reelection and that I'm going to leave Congress," DeLay, who turns 59 on Saturday, said during a 90-minute interview on Monday. "I'm very much at peace with it." He notified President Bush in the afternoon. DeLay and his wife, Christine, said they had been prepared to fight, but that he decided last Wednesday, after months of prayer and contemplation, to spare his suburban Houston district the mudfest to come. "This had become a referendum on me," he said. "So it's better for me to step aside and let it be a referendum on ideas, Republican values and what's important for this district."
DeLay's fall has been stunningly swift, one of the most brutal and decisive in American history. He had to give up his title of Majority Leader, the No. 2 spot in the House Republican leadership, in September when a Texas grand jury indicted him on charges of trying to evade the state's election law. So he moved out of his palatial suite in the Capitol, where he once brandished a "No Whining" mug during feisty weekly sessions with reporters, and moved across the street to the Cannon House Office Building, home of many freshmen.

The surprise decision was based on the sort of ruthless calculation that had once given him unchallenged dominance of House Republicans and their wealthy friends in Washington's lobbying community: he realized he might lose in this November's election. DeLay got a scare in a Republican primary last month, and a recent poll taken by his campaign gave him a roughly 50-50 shot of winning, in an election season when Republicans need every seat they can hang onto to avoid a Democratic takeover of the House.
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Asked if he had done anything illegal or immoral in public office, DeLay replied curtly, "No." Asked if he'd done anything immoral, he said with a laugh, "We're all sinners." Asked what he would do differently, he said, "Nothing." He denied having failed to adequately supervise members of his staff, even though two of his former aides have pleaded guilty to committing crimes while on his staff.

DeLay brushed off the torrent of investigative news articles questioning the funding behind the golf, private planes and resort hotels that marked his travel at home and abroad. He even accepted a plane from R.J. Reynolds Tobacco to go to his arraignment. "There's nothing wrong with it," he said. "They had a plane available. My schedule was such that I couldn't do it commercially — that I had to get up there and then get back and do my job. And that's the only plane that was available at the time."


"You can't prove to me one thing that I have done for my own personal gain," he added. "Yes, I play golf. I'm very proud of the fact that I play golf. It's the only thing that I do for myself. And when you go to a country and you're there for seven days and you take an afternoon off to play golf, what does the national media write? All about the golf, not about the meeting that went to. I'm not ashamed of anything I've done. I've never done anything in my political career for my own personal gain. You can look at my bank account and my house to understand that."
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Delay stands as a perfect shambling, oozing embodiment of the theo-political monster that has gutted and commandeered what used to be the Republican Party. A loathsome distillate of the most grotesque impulses of the “Fuck Everyone But Me” political Right and the “Better Living Through Armageddon” Christian Right.

Hey, I’m sure his harpy wife only has a single, good, Republican cloth coat and his breedlings play every day with their little dog Checkers.

As I am equally sure that anyone who measures corruption and power in dollars and cents is a child who understands neither money nor power, and can’t be trusted with either.

It’s simple; so simple that Tony Montana can sum it up in three sentences:

"In this country, you gotta make the money first. Then when you get the money, you get the power. Then when you get the power, then you get the woman."

DeLay just found a way to skip over the first step, because while cash buys you shit, great wealth lets you bend the world to your will.

Power is a shortcut to the same end; a pure, uncut version of the same commodity.

Tom DeLay went into government in for the same reason al-Qaeda sleepers went into flight school: in inflict the maximum damage on the United State of America in the name a fake and vile God.

It his pursuit of the destruction of the U.S. government, DeLay bought and sold the public trust in the coin of that realm: Power.

And trading in that currency to deliberate detriment of the public good is a betrayal far deeper and more ferocious than some Alderman pocketing a few bucks from a bartender who wants renew his liquor license.

DeLay is the Republican Party. With the mask off, snarling and blood fresh on its teeth. The Party that snickers in blogs and behind closed doors at the dead of NOLA. The Party that feeds our children – year after year -- into the Mesopotamia Meatgrinder rather than let their Dauphin-in-Chief lose face.

The Party commanded in word and deed by Mullah Falwell and Mullah Robertson, who don’t especially want cash-money either.

They just want to eviscerate our Democracy, install a Theocracy and preside over the annihilation of the world in the name of the Prince of Peace.