No more Delay! Huzzah! US House of Representatives member Tom Delay (R-Tex) has announced his resignation, effective "sometime in June" according to a videotaped statement he sent earlier today to the media. [We can all guess why he wouldn't face the media directly.--Ed.]
The Hammer is no more. All I can say is that it's about time. Hubris ever goes before a fall, and Delay certainly had plenty of pride to go around. What finally prompted him to do a 180° from his public face of total confidence despite ever-increasing pressure from the ethics violation accusations against him? One of his top aides pleaded guilty to criminal corruption charges at the end of last week. The aide apparently told the judge that he knew more about a lot of things than he delineated in his written guilty plea. Delay must finally have seen (and with apologies to Mel Brooks) that the jig was up.
Of course, Delay wouldn't admit to this. He claims he was facing a very, very expensive reelection campaign and stood a real chance of losing, so he wanted to get out of the way to make sure a Republican would hold his soon-to-be-ex-seat in November. Right. Want to buy a bridge? He got his district redrawn to hold a solid 55% Republican majority, and he won a bruising and heavily-contested 4-way Republican primary earlier this year. What he really wants to do is use the money in his campaign war chest to pay his legal bills.
Despite my saying that, my hope now is that a higher road will be taken in response. The only way we are going to end our own American version of the eternal tit-for-tat [as brought to you daily by events in the Middle East.--Ed.] is to avoid swinging as violently to the left as Delay pounded to the right. Besides, it will give the Democrats the mantle of moral superiority to be civilized in response to Delay's fall.
But blood is in the water, and I fear a feeding frenzy will commence.
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